It's a difficult concept because the fundamentalists see it as an "interpretation" of the Bible that directly contradicts the written text in Genesis.
Their flavor of religion is based on the absolute truth of every word in the book. If you could so much as disprove one word of what it says, you'd upset their core beliefs. So they defend everything fanatically, regardless of how absurd, regardless of evidence to the contrary, regardless of the direct contradictions already inherent in the stories.
Unfortunately, there is no reasoning with someone whose tenets are founded on the premise that questioning their teachings is heresy.
Most people are reasonable about it, which is why we mostly get along. It's when the fundamentalists (be they Christian or Islamic or Flying Spaghetti Monsterists) are in charge that order decays. And that's what the Constitution is set up to defend against.
"Ignorance of the law does not excuse." It's a legal principle that has applied since at least the Roman empire. If you are driving a car, you are expected to know the traffic laws. If you're using a computer, you are expected to know the laws pertaining to computers. If you are copying music, you are expected to know the laws regarding copyright.
For example, if you are driving a car across an unfamiliar state, and your state law permits you to turn right at a stop sign without stopping (Wisconsin), and you roll through a right turn at a Minnesota stop sign, you are indeed guilty of violating the Minnesota statute.
Without this principle, a defendant could always claim: "I thought every state was the same as my state" or "I didn't know armed robbery was a crime" or "I didn't know downloading music was against the law."
However, ignorance *can* buy you sympathy from a judge when it's time for sentencing. That's one reason you see laws with phrases like "willful intent" or "knowingly did commit". If you knew you were uploading copyrighted materials, the judge would probably hand you your ass.
Bottom line: if you are using a computer to download copyrighted music, you are in violation of the law. If your computer is uploading that music to others, you are in continued violation of the law. You are not innocent because you are ignorant.
Now if they won for a downloader or innocent uploader
Define "innocent" uploader. Do you mean "uploader of copyrighted content who has not been arrested, given a jury trial, and convicted?"
Or do you mean "uploader of uncopyrighted content"? Because there's a lot of legal difference between the two.
To do this, he needs to get rid of his stake in Microsoft stock.
I'd be afraid that would spell financial death for Microsoft. If Gates were to suddenly dump all his MSFT, the markets would react violently. The traders would infer all kinds of reasons why he might be selling off, based on some variation of "he knows something we don't". They'd also consider that his stock currently will continue to give him a clear voice of the shareholders, one that would be silenced without his stock. Their stock price would plunge like Wile E. Coyote off a cliff, possibly depleting their cash reserves before they could recover.
Whether the Microsoft-bashers around here agree or not, Microsoft is seen as part of the infrastructure that's holding up every Fortune 500 company. If the traders thought that Microsoft wasn't reliable, they'd start questioning every company's ability to function in a world without Microsoft. I wouldn't be surprised if such an action would throw the rest of the U.S. market into a spiral (and possibly the global markets, too.) The economic malaise would likely be worse than the market effects following 9/11.
So Bill is essentially bound to his stock out of social responsibility. Sure, he can sell a few percent every year for some pocket money, but unless he donates it flat-out to charity, he can't get out from underneath it all without serious repercussions to the rest of us.
It's really, really weird to contemplate that kind of power.
Without him, I am not sure that personal technology would have taken off, and it would only be at work that I could do things like waste time on the internet and argue with strangers.
For that very reason, I'd give him the bird. Without Windows, 90% of today's computer users out there wouldn't own computers at all. The internet would be more like it was in the early 90s. A nice quiet place for geeks to hang out and swap lies, without all of those fscktards from myspace, faceplant or AOL.
No, Word is a cruel developer-led plot to sap the output of the business analysts. By keeping their conflicting requirements tangled up in Word, and by shifting their focus to fonts and colors, it keeps them from ever actually finishing them and so inflicting them upon the hapless developers.
By one estimation*, developers would have almost twice as many annoying requirements if business analysts were to switch to open-source word-smithing tools.
*In his defense, the estimator was both drunk and bitter at the set of requirements he had just been handed.
Rasterization is the process taking some object or model that is precisely defined and placing it on a screen made of components. Because of this ailiasing occurs. That's kind of a non-point. Rasterizing and aliasing happens all the time with standard television signals. But I have no problem distinguishing between a rendered actor (a "synthespian") and a human actor. It's not the aliasing, it's the full complement of lighting, shading, texture, model, physics, motion, etc.
And even if you could perfectly render flesh, hair, cloth, etc., to the point where I couldn't see the difference in a static image, there's still the problem of motion. Human gait is still modeled horribly. Motion capture helps for those scenes when it can be used, but I've yet to see a controllable character with a believable gait.
IMO, designing with scalability in mind always helps, but I have no evidence beyond anecdotal to back this up.
That's because the principles used to make a project scalable are sound design principles in general. Strong interfaces. High cohesion. Low coupling. Small modules. N-tier architecture. Model/View/Controller. Don't Repeat Yourself. All of those sorts of principles (and many more) are embraced by the most successful projects. They apply at all levels of design, from creating templates to libraries to user applications. They're so ingrained that designers generally don't talk about them, because they are so obvious.
And they're all geared for scalability. By having a strong interface, you can move a function to a service, or replace it with a more efficient function. With high cohesion, your functions are reusable by more clients. With low coupling, your functions can be used in more environments. With an n-tier architecture, you can move layers to different hardware to solve different scalability problems (a bigger database engine is a common example.) MVC lets you split the UI from the business layer, perhaps enabling a web interface. Every principle has a reason for existing, and one of the effects of each of those reasons enables scalability.
Wrapping those principles are some equally basic processes: Have coding standards. Use test driven development. Code reviews. Continuous integration. Iterative releasing. And the list goes on.
Processes help assure quality at many levels, mostly by driving tests. Following coding standards help you work on the code without surprises. Test driven development leads to more cohesive code, with lower coupling (it's a bear to test a tightly coupled object.) Code reviews help you learn by having your peers test your skill, and help your peers learn about you and your code's function. Continuous integration ensures tests are frequently run. Iterative releasing ensures your users are testing your system frequently.
And if you don't start out with that wonderful structure, you'd better learn how to refactor your code base and your project to get it there.
You mock it, but not only does this pass for research, but it's business advice on innovation: seek outside your boundaries for answers. Businesses frequently ask outside experts to participate in design and innovation activities, and only for a stipend. Proctor and Gamble and 3M are both renowned for this type of activity.
It's certainly not the only strategy to create or discover new ideas, but who knows when a post by J. Random Luser might contain that cool spark that sends you down a new path of thinking?
So if you don't want to participate, don't. If you want to lie to him and tell him something like "procedural code is on the ascendancy again", that's also funny. If you just want to post goatse links; well, this is Slashdot, and nobody's stopping you from that either. But you shouldn't necessarily discount the value of what he might be gaining from this little exercise. It could provide insight into the leading edge of future software design.
Processing can still be noisy if you have to get rid of a lot of heat, and a lot of heat is likely when you're slinging pixels at a 1080p screen. Of course there are watercooling options, and Zalman is all about making silenced cases these days, so you're right that it doesn't have to be noisy.
Regarding the drobo, I hear they're pretty slow. I don't know if they're fast enough to keep up with a compressed HD movie or not, as I don't have one myself.
I also read Jaaski's blog, and he's not differing at all with the reporter. According to the very post you mentioned, he wants Open Source people to "understand WHY certain things are made the way they are." That's not a disagreement with the reporter, that's purely asking open source people to roll over and play dead when DRM issues are raised, because he's essentially saying 'we do DRM so that media providers will give us content.' He's trying to apologize for the stupidity of DRM while still having paid-for content. Actually, he isn't even apologizing -- he just wants to cash those yummy paychecks.
Well, it doesn't work that way. The open source community will not stand for DRM, and will refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of DRM until they collectively draw their dying breaths. Doesn't matter if some millionaires whine, doesn't matter if some corporate hotshots or industry leaders think the Open Source community doesn't "get it". We get it all right. If they don't like unprotected media, then they shouldn't bother trying to provide protected content.
So read his notes carefully. He's trying to sound like he disagrees, but in reality he wants his cake and he wants to eat it too. But the cake is a lie.
Way, way back when, I used to run the Proxomitron, and spent hours and hours configuring it. I actually tried several proxies over time, including squid, junkbuster and later privoxy. And I'd troll through sites with my hosts file open, plonking ad server after ad server.
And I noticed all along that I spent at least half an hour a week building edit scripts to block all these stupid ads, and I still couldn't block many of the annoying things, and the page authors delighted in coming up with new methods to wave ads in my face, and I had to edit files to whitelist some sites, and after all that I still had to run IE to get to my bank.
Then came Mozilla 0.9 and things improved greatly over Netscape, but I still tended the Proxomitron. And along came Phoenix and then Firefox, and things improved again, (although the logo was nowhere near as cool as the block-art dinosaur.) But I still hung on to the Proxomitron, as it was absolutely the coolest tool for modifying pages and blocking crap.
And then came AdBlock. I ditched the proxomitron about a week later, sort of bemoaning all the lost functionality I was giving up and all the effort I had poured into those files. It was simply the ease of use that trumped everything else you've suggested above. Flashblock was a godsend. And it's gotten even better with the advent of whitelisting in NoScript, (I couldn't use NoScript without it because its popup bar was every bit as intrusive as the crap it was blocking.)
Browsing is supposed to be about viewing the sites you want to see, and in my case that includes not seeing all the headache-inducing blinking and swooping crap. It's not supposed to be about spending time figuring out how to defeat that crap, and with those tools it's not. With your suggested set of manual tools, it was a metric assload of work, and I wasn't keeping up. And even though I couldn't afford to keep wasting that kind of time, every week or so another clever site had discovered another way to wave some crap in my face, and I'd be off on another hunt through the page source, looking for a way to shut it down.
Since then, of course I've found dozens of other useful extensions. Greasemonkey restored some of the cool stuff I had been able to with the Proxomitron, and other clever people have built brilliant scripts for it, such as the one that allows me to zoom in on Google maps with the scrollwheel. I have extensions that "tart-up" Slashdot with a bunch of AJAXy stuff, an EXIF viewer that I frequently use for examining photographs, a Page Resurrector that knows how to dig in the wayback machine for ancient stuff, a bookmark synchronizer (I'm not a big fan of del.icio.us) and the list goes on and on. And yes, I use most of them very frequently.
So yeah, extensions are totally the dealbreaker. Big time. Opera could be given away free, it could be four times as fast, and they could throw in closed source implementations of everything I just mentioned, and it still wouldn't impress me. People on the internet are a lot more innovative than a limited company, and new extensions come around constantly. Lots are crap, but there are still plenty of jewels. Extensions make browsing pleasant again.
The Ranger and the Mazda B series trucks are identical except for the stick-on logos. They're both made on the same production line by the same people with the same materials. In America, the last Ford plant making Rangers is in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Ford has announced they'll close it at the end of 2009. I understand that in Thailand the Mazda plant is doing the same thing, producing the Mazda B trucks and Ford Rangers for the European and Asian markets, but that plant is in no danger of shutting down, as the rest of the world likes owning fuel-efficient small trucks.
I'm thinking Ford will probably take another look at current Ranger sales before continuing with the plan to close the St. Paul plant. But even with rising gas prices, customers in this crappy economy still have to actually buy new Rangers in order for Ford to keep making them.
I think the GP was saying there are three choices of non-depletable energy sources (except for nuclear energy), or perhaps he meant non-polluting (not that hectares of farmland or the production of ethanol don't pollute, nor is spent uranium a pollutant.) And by thermal energy being limited to Iceland, he didn't mean you couldn't use a ground-source heat pump in Minnesota. And by no such thing as alternative energy, he didn't mean that oil and coal weren't the primary sources of energy in the industrial world today. And he's probably lumping in hydroelectric dams and wind generators with solar energy (the sun fuels the weather, after all) and tidal power with,... uh, well...
I give up. I can't rationalize his mistakes as fast as he can make them.
The idea is to use SwiftFuel as a no-lead replacement.
Lead is currently added to avgas to retard premature detonation in the cylinders, and to increase the octane rating. One of the problems with unleaded fuels is that they produce higher compression than avgas. Today's unleaded gas would increase compression to the point where it would literally blow the seals out of the engines. They also have different chemical effects on materials that may cause deterioration in such parts as fuel lines and gaskets. Another difference is that the lead additives help protect the engine valve seats from eroding.
Airplane engines were designed to run on a very specific fuel, that had very specific properties. Avgas produces a precise amount of compression when it's burnt. The old engines were designed to be run at 100% of their potential power, so there is no tolerance for out-of-spec components, such as unleaded fuel.
In order for SwiftFuel to be an acceptable replacement, it will have to have very similar characteristics to today's avgas. Either that or it will have to be "close enough" so that older engines can at least be modified to burn it, and that would promise to be an unpopular, expensive decision (airplane repairs are never cheap.)
Oops, sorry, I mis-spoke above. An EMP will not destroy ALL the navigational equipment. It would only destroy the transistor-based electronic navigational equipment. Mechanically powered equipment, such as vacuum powered gyroscopes, turn and bank indicators, air speed and altimeters would all continue to work normally. And if your radios are old enough (tube-based) they'll continue to operate as well.
So if you're in the plane that's hit by the EMP, don't worry. It'll keep flying, and the pilot will still be able to navigate. He'll just have to use the mechanical instruments without relying on the fancy GPS and glass displays. Failure of the electronic systems, by the way, is a failure they practice in training and may be tested on.
Really, the only way an EMP would bring down a small plane is if the pilot had a pacemaker, and a pacemaker is pretty much going to get a pilot's medical certificate yanked anyway, so he'd no longer be flying.
When a plane gets hit with by the EMP it WILL go down. Not at all. For example, my friend's Luscombe (made in 1947) does not have an electrical system. No lights, no radios, no wires. Spark is provided by a magneto system, which already harnesses large magnetic pulses to generate electricity. An EMP might suck the cast iron block in the direction of the magnet for a microsecond or two, perhaps cause a few poorly timed sparks to fire harmlessly in the presence of exhaust gas, twitch the dashboard compass, and make the iPod in his pocket go "poof", but other than that absolutely nothing else in the plane would even react.
Even in a regular general aviation plane with a real electrical system, all an EMP will do is fry the navigational and communications equipment. Unlike computer controlled fuel injectors, most small aircraft engines operate 100% mechanically. The control surfaces are all mechanical, except possibly for some "fancy options", such as an electrical trim system. But even then, electrical (non-electronic) equipment won't be damaged by an EMP.
EMP pulses break electronic things by inducing voltages high enough to destroy P-N junctions. They're not Star Wars tractor beams.
OMG! I just read the new requirements, and they've actually made it both more modern and more difficult to earn! Before this, I've only seen merit badge requirements loosened, never tightened.
The old computing merit badge was kind of fun just from the standpoint of how much it hadn't evolved over time. Most badges are just fine with a review once a decade or so, but when a kid is asked to use a modem to connect to Prodigy, it kind of reduces his options.
Too bad they don't have to still build a model of drum memory (from the 1967 requirements.) That would be cool.
Hmm. I wonder how many slashdotters could pass the old test? Especially these requirements:
8. Convert your full name to each of the following codes:
Hollerith
Binary-coded decimal
Eight channel standard code
and
11. Do the following:
Construct an analog adder and explain its operation
Construct a card reader, demonstrate it to your merit badge counselor, and explain to him the difference between the Hollerith card code and the internal machine code.
Slashdot Mirror
Watched the video in your link. Apparently the announcer is confusing a "three stage" auger with their "three paddle" auger.
Their flavor of religion is based on the absolute truth of every word in the book. If you could so much as disprove one word of what it says, you'd upset their core beliefs. So they defend everything fanatically, regardless of how absurd, regardless of evidence to the contrary, regardless of the direct contradictions already inherent in the stories.
Unfortunately, there is no reasoning with someone whose tenets are founded on the premise that questioning their teachings is heresy.
Most people are reasonable about it, which is why we mostly get along. It's when the fundamentalists (be they Christian or Islamic or Flying Spaghetti Monsterists) are in charge that order decays. And that's what the Constitution is set up to defend against.
"Ignorance of the law does not excuse." It's a legal principle that has applied since at least the Roman empire. If you are driving a car, you are expected to know the traffic laws. If you're using a computer, you are expected to know the laws pertaining to computers. If you are copying music, you are expected to know the laws regarding copyright.
For example, if you are driving a car across an unfamiliar state, and your state law permits you to turn right at a stop sign without stopping (Wisconsin), and you roll through a right turn at a Minnesota stop sign, you are indeed guilty of violating the Minnesota statute.
Without this principle, a defendant could always claim: "I thought every state was the same as my state" or "I didn't know armed robbery was a crime" or "I didn't know downloading music was against the law."
However, ignorance *can* buy you sympathy from a judge when it's time for sentencing. That's one reason you see laws with phrases like "willful intent" or "knowingly did commit". If you knew you were uploading copyrighted materials, the judge would probably hand you your ass.
Bottom line: if you are using a computer to download copyrighted music, you are in violation of the law. If your computer is uploading that music to others, you are in continued violation of the law. You are not innocent because you are ignorant.
Now if they won for a downloader or innocent uploader
Define "innocent" uploader. Do you mean "uploader of copyrighted content who has not been arrested, given a jury trial, and convicted?" Or do you mean "uploader of uncopyrighted content"? Because there's a lot of legal difference between the two.
To do this, he needs to get rid of his stake in Microsoft stock.
I'd be afraid that would spell financial death for Microsoft. If Gates were to suddenly dump all his MSFT, the markets would react violently. The traders would infer all kinds of reasons why he might be selling off, based on some variation of "he knows something we don't". They'd also consider that his stock currently will continue to give him a clear voice of the shareholders, one that would be silenced without his stock. Their stock price would plunge like Wile E. Coyote off a cliff, possibly depleting their cash reserves before they could recover.
Whether the Microsoft-bashers around here agree or not, Microsoft is seen as part of the infrastructure that's holding up every Fortune 500 company. If the traders thought that Microsoft wasn't reliable, they'd start questioning every company's ability to function in a world without Microsoft. I wouldn't be surprised if such an action would throw the rest of the U.S. market into a spiral (and possibly the global markets, too.) The economic malaise would likely be worse than the market effects following 9/11.
So Bill is essentially bound to his stock out of social responsibility. Sure, he can sell a few percent every year for some pocket money, but unless he donates it flat-out to charity, he can't get out from underneath it all without serious repercussions to the rest of us.
It's really, really weird to contemplate that kind of power.
Without him, I am not sure that personal technology would have taken off, and it would only be at work that I could do things like waste time on the internet and argue with strangers.
For that very reason, I'd give him the bird. Without Windows, 90% of today's computer users out there wouldn't own computers at all. The internet would be more like it was in the early 90s. A nice quiet place for geeks to hang out and swap lies, without all of those fscktards from myspace, faceplant or AOL.
And get off my lawn, too!
By one estimation*, developers would have almost twice as many annoying requirements if business analysts were to switch to open-source word-smithing tools.
*In his defense, the estimator was both drunk and bitter at the set of requirements he had just been handed.
Long live the Font for the Liberation of Linux! Down with the heretics of the LFL!!
And even if you could perfectly render flesh, hair, cloth, etc., to the point where I couldn't see the difference in a static image, there's still the problem of motion. Human gait is still modeled horribly. Motion capture helps for those scenes when it can be used, but I've yet to see a controllable character with a believable gait.
That's because the principles used to make a project scalable are sound design principles in general. Strong interfaces. High cohesion. Low coupling. Small modules. N-tier architecture. Model/View/Controller. Don't Repeat Yourself. All of those sorts of principles (and many more) are embraced by the most successful projects. They apply at all levels of design, from creating templates to libraries to user applications. They're so ingrained that designers generally don't talk about them, because they are so obvious.
And they're all geared for scalability. By having a strong interface, you can move a function to a service, or replace it with a more efficient function. With high cohesion, your functions are reusable by more clients. With low coupling, your functions can be used in more environments. With an n-tier architecture, you can move layers to different hardware to solve different scalability problems (a bigger database engine is a common example.) MVC lets you split the UI from the business layer, perhaps enabling a web interface. Every principle has a reason for existing, and one of the effects of each of those reasons enables scalability.
Wrapping those principles are some equally basic processes: Have coding standards. Use test driven development. Code reviews. Continuous integration. Iterative releasing. And the list goes on.
Processes help assure quality at many levels, mostly by driving tests. Following coding standards help you work on the code without surprises. Test driven development leads to more cohesive code, with lower coupling (it's a bear to test a tightly coupled object.) Code reviews help you learn by having your peers test your skill, and help your peers learn about you and your code's function. Continuous integration ensures tests are frequently run. Iterative releasing ensures your users are testing your system frequently.
And if you don't start out with that wonderful structure, you'd better learn how to refactor your code base and your project to get it there.
// Comments.
Least universally usefulIt's certainly not the only strategy to create or discover new ideas, but who knows when a post by J. Random Luser might contain that cool spark that sends you down a new path of thinking?
So if you don't want to participate, don't. If you want to lie to him and tell him something like "procedural code is on the ascendancy again", that's also funny. If you just want to post goatse links; well, this is Slashdot, and nobody's stopping you from that either. But you shouldn't necessarily discount the value of what he might be gaining from this little exercise. It could provide insight into the leading edge of future software design.
Regarding the drobo, I hear they're pretty slow. I don't know if they're fast enough to keep up with a compressed HD movie or not, as I don't have one myself.
I also read Jaaski's blog, and he's not differing at all with the reporter. According to the very post you mentioned, he wants Open Source people to "understand WHY certain things are made the way they are." That's not a disagreement with the reporter, that's purely asking open source people to roll over and play dead when DRM issues are raised, because he's essentially saying 'we do DRM so that media providers will give us content.' He's trying to apologize for the stupidity of DRM while still having paid-for content. Actually, he isn't even apologizing -- he just wants to cash those yummy paychecks.
Well, it doesn't work that way. The open source community will not stand for DRM, and will refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of DRM until they collectively draw their dying breaths. Doesn't matter if some millionaires whine, doesn't matter if some corporate hotshots or industry leaders think the Open Source community doesn't "get it". We get it all right. If they don't like unprotected media, then they shouldn't bother trying to provide protected content.
So read his notes carefully. He's trying to sound like he disagrees, but in reality he wants his cake and he wants to eat it too. But the cake is a lie.
Well, I suppose someone could write an open source DRM module for mplayer. Would that work for you?
I RTFA, and it's actually an accurate summary of his speech. It really sounds like the guy honestly believes the crap he's spewing.
And I noticed all along that I spent at least half an hour a week building edit scripts to block all these stupid ads, and I still couldn't block many of the annoying things, and the page authors delighted in coming up with new methods to wave ads in my face, and I had to edit files to whitelist some sites, and after all that I still had to run IE to get to my bank.
Then came Mozilla 0.9 and things improved greatly over Netscape, but I still tended the Proxomitron. And along came Phoenix and then Firefox, and things improved again, (although the logo was nowhere near as cool as the block-art dinosaur.) But I still hung on to the Proxomitron, as it was absolutely the coolest tool for modifying pages and blocking crap.
And then came AdBlock. I ditched the proxomitron about a week later, sort of bemoaning all the lost functionality I was giving up and all the effort I had poured into those files. It was simply the ease of use that trumped everything else you've suggested above. Flashblock was a godsend. And it's gotten even better with the advent of whitelisting in NoScript, (I couldn't use NoScript without it because its popup bar was every bit as intrusive as the crap it was blocking.)
Browsing is supposed to be about viewing the sites you want to see, and in my case that includes not seeing all the headache-inducing blinking and swooping crap. It's not supposed to be about spending time figuring out how to defeat that crap, and with those tools it's not. With your suggested set of manual tools, it was a metric assload of work, and I wasn't keeping up. And even though I couldn't afford to keep wasting that kind of time, every week or so another clever site had discovered another way to wave some crap in my face, and I'd be off on another hunt through the page source, looking for a way to shut it down.
Since then, of course I've found dozens of other useful extensions. Greasemonkey restored some of the cool stuff I had been able to with the Proxomitron, and other clever people have built brilliant scripts for it, such as the one that allows me to zoom in on Google maps with the scrollwheel. I have extensions that "tart-up" Slashdot with a bunch of AJAXy stuff, an EXIF viewer that I frequently use for examining photographs, a Page Resurrector that knows how to dig in the wayback machine for ancient stuff, a bookmark synchronizer (I'm not a big fan of del.icio.us) and the list goes on and on. And yes, I use most of them very frequently.
So yeah, extensions are totally the dealbreaker. Big time. Opera could be given away free, it could be four times as fast, and they could throw in closed source implementations of everything I just mentioned, and it still wouldn't impress me. People on the internet are a lot more innovative than a limited company, and new extensions come around constantly. Lots are crap, but there are still plenty of jewels. Extensions make browsing pleasant again.
No, they're not insane, they're Paultards. They were born missing the gene for rational thought.
Thank you for the correction.
I'm thinking Ford will probably take another look at current Ranger sales before continuing with the plan to close the St. Paul plant. But even with rising gas prices, customers in this crappy economy still have to actually buy new Rangers in order for Ford to keep making them.
I give up. I can't rationalize his mistakes as fast as he can make them.
Lead is currently added to avgas to retard premature detonation in the cylinders, and to increase the octane rating. One of the problems with unleaded fuels is that they produce higher compression than avgas. Today's unleaded gas would increase compression to the point where it would literally blow the seals out of the engines. They also have different chemical effects on materials that may cause deterioration in such parts as fuel lines and gaskets. Another difference is that the lead additives help protect the engine valve seats from eroding.
Airplane engines were designed to run on a very specific fuel, that had very specific properties. Avgas produces a precise amount of compression when it's burnt. The old engines were designed to be run at 100% of their potential power, so there is no tolerance for out-of-spec components, such as unleaded fuel.
In order for SwiftFuel to be an acceptable replacement, it will have to have very similar characteristics to today's avgas. Either that or it will have to be "close enough" so that older engines can at least be modified to burn it, and that would promise to be an unpopular, expensive decision (airplane repairs are never cheap.)
So if you're in the plane that's hit by the EMP, don't worry. It'll keep flying, and the pilot will still be able to navigate. He'll just have to use the mechanical instruments without relying on the fancy GPS and glass displays. Failure of the electronic systems, by the way, is a failure they practice in training and may be tested on.
Really, the only way an EMP would bring down a small plane is if the pilot had a pacemaker, and a pacemaker is pretty much going to get a pilot's medical certificate yanked anyway, so he'd no longer be flying.
Even in a regular general aviation plane with a real electrical system, all an EMP will do is fry the navigational and communications equipment. Unlike computer controlled fuel injectors, most small aircraft engines operate 100% mechanically. The control surfaces are all mechanical, except possibly for some "fancy options", such as an electrical trim system. But even then, electrical (non-electronic) equipment won't be damaged by an EMP.
EMP pulses break electronic things by inducing voltages high enough to destroy P-N junctions. They're not Star Wars tractor beams.
The old computing merit badge was kind of fun just from the standpoint of how much it hadn't evolved over time. Most badges are just fine with a review once a decade or so, but when a kid is asked to use a modem to connect to Prodigy, it kind of reduces his options.
Too bad they don't have to still build a model of drum memory (from the 1967 requirements.) That would be cool.
Hmm. I wonder how many slashdotters could pass the old test? Especially these requirements:
8. Convert your full name to each of the following codes:
and
11. Do the following: