The Hindenberg's hydrogen burned off in seconds. The big problem was the paint that used powdered aluminum, which was also electrically conductive. Add one significant spark (possible lightning) plus powdered aluminum (main volatile ingredient in the shuttle's solid-fuel boosters) and you get a big fire.
So yes, the hydrogen fears are minor. Had the Hindenberg been painted in a normal color, and not shiny silver, airships may have survived for some time to come.
This, of course, is what your air conditioner system is for. It's not there just to cool the place; the AC also dehumidifies the air. I suspect that most uses of these units would not drive up the humidity so fast that it would do much harm; by the time it gets there, you should have either powered off equipment, or turned on your diesel generator. (You do have one for your mission-critical equipment, don't you?)
I know the comment is somewhat facetious, but look at the number of wars in Europe compared to the number in North America, even including the Indian Wars. Looking at a smaller scale, consider the violent crime rates in the inner city with those in the extremely rural districts. You may have a more valid point here than you know.
Re:Looks like a "3rd World country" is beating US
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 2
Hey, we have to keep our war-mongerer-supported industries alive somehow.:)
Re:Wrong country
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Of course. What this means, though, is that there are also segments of the United States where there is room to continue spreading. I live in Southern California, and while I have the luxury of a shift that does not require me to drive in heavy traffic all that often, I do quickly tire of traffic when I do have to experience it. I'm considering moving in the next couple of years to a somewhat less fully-populated area, probably far from the current locale.
Europe, on the other hand, has considerably less expansion room, other than up. This means less room for new roads and highways, and dictates more spending on railways and busses, which can carry a higher proportion of people per volume. I'd love to see more rail here in SoCal. There was recently a plan to add a nice 35-mile rail system linking just north and central Orange County, with some spurs including around where I work and live. I was all for it -- except the central county NIMBYs have managed to scale it back to a mere 12-mile line, and it goes nowhere near where I work and live. Oh, well.
Re:Great news technically, but ...
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 2
I don't know about easily, but it does burn hot and bright. This might be the perfect car for those that want to go out in the proverbial "blaze of glory", though.
Re:Looks like a "3rd World country" is beating US
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 2
US GDP: $10 trillion German GDP: $2.2 trillion Ratio: 4.5:1
US Population: 280M German Population: 83M Ratio: 3.4:1
Source: CIA World Factbook 2002
As for the defense budgets, need I remind you of the American forces in Germany? They may not be so necessary anymore, and on this basis alone (and not nationalism), I wouldn't mind seeing them come home, though that might well be a poor decision at some point in the future. I do wonder how it would affect Germany's economy, which I understand to be a little shaky at the moment, if the American forces did leave. I'm sure they contribute at least some to local money numbers. It would be an interesting experiment.
Re:Wrong country
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This may have something to do with population density enforcing a move to public transportation. I've spent the last few minutes using the CIA World Factbook to compare the US population and area to that of the European nations west of the old USSR boundaries. The conclusion?
USA Population: 280,562,489 Land Area: 9,158,960 sq km Population Density: 30.63 people per sq km
Europe Population: 567,355,034 (202.22% of the United States) Land Area: 5,372,251 (58.66% of the United States) Population Density: 105.61 (344.76% of the United States)
Europe (excluding former Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia) Population: 469,328,309 (167.28% of the United States) Land Area: 4,425,959 (48.32% of the United States) Population Density: 106.04 (346.17% of the United States)
When you have three and a half times the population density, you really have to get creative in how you handle transportation. To match this kind of density, the United States would need a population of 971,000,000. I imagine we'd come up with something in that case, too.
Re:239 MPG car
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Having worked for an oil exploration company (Unocal), I know that this is already done. The efficiency with which existing wells are tapped is much higher than it used to be. Unocal does mostly off-shore work in the Gulf of Mexico, off of Indonesia, and some exploratory work off of West Africa (with smaller operations in many other locations), and I remember talking to some of the engineers about the process.
Some of the initial investigation is done using sounding from a boat to check out the sea bed and the underlying geology, and they usually return four reels of tape that contain more than a terabyte of information each. This is then run through computers to determine the true geology to great detail, and if it looks like there's a possible profit to it, further work is done to investigate whether a drill rig should be put into place. This is not a lightly-made decision by any means; these rigs can take more than a year to construct and are very expensive to operate. Every single one of them uses the latest available technology, so no two platforms -- even in the same field -- are quite alike because they are usually started at least a few months apart, and the state of the art advances even in that short time. Rigs are left in place until the very last possible barrel of oil has been extracted, and sometimes longer than that if a possibly promising new technology that can be refit to an existing rig becomes available. These rigs also are the endpoints for more and more wells, sometimes covering hundreds of square miles for a single rig with wells going off at all angles, decreasing the cost for tapping a given field.
Once a rig is no longer useful and there's no immediate hope of re-use, its wells are capped (though the caps can, of course, be removed later), the rig abandoned, and either scrapped or scuttled. If scrapped, the materials get reused, and if scuttled, the fish get a new home and place to play.
Much research is now going into investigating the heaviest crude oils. This stuff is thick beyond belief, and almost impossible to pump with current technology. Oil companies have been investigating how to do this for the last 25 years or more, starting around the energy crisis of the '70s when OPEC flexed its muscle, and have made some progress, but it's still not a profitable field at this point. I remember reading an article long ago that suggested that the US is sitting on a virtual sea of this ultra-thick oil that could allow for total domestic consumption, but because it can't be pumped, it sits there, waiting for the day when we get advanced and/or desperate enough to do something with it.
They want to call your version of fair use a copyright violation, and, by extension, theft. Fair use has, itself, been redefined to some extent by the law over the last couple of decades. Is it correct? Probably not, or at least not in the way that the Supreme Court ruled, but until such time as the laws defining the current version of fair use are struck down or rewritten, it is theft. If you want to see it changed so much, go buy a laptop and a DVD, then go to your local police station, rip it in front of them, and then watch the movie. Once you've done that, and confessed to the police, then you can go to court and argue the merits of the law. I'll watch closely, and I'll applaud and support you -- I'll even donate to your legal defense fund -- but until you or someone else takes the law head-on and challenges it all the way and gets it overturned, the action is still illegal.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it allows the seller to define a product's value in terms of what he believes he deserves. Setting morality arguments aside for a moment, the market doesn't work this way: the seller does not get to assert what he thinks his profits should have been.
The market does work that way. If I own something, I am entitled to set a price for it, and therefore my level of profit. Whether or not anyone actually buys it is immaterial to this section of the process. If I want a profit of one dollar per item, I may set that price; I may also demand a profit of one million dollars per item. Will you buy it? Will he? Will she? It depends on what value the buyer associates with the product. Generally speaking, if I am the only source of a given product, and it's not critical to someone's survival (food, water, medicine, etc), my pricing decisions are completely legal.
Since the very income they are counting on from _you_ depends entirely on _your_ intent, it becomes an impossible construct.
By not purchasing it, you are, in effect, intending to deny the copyright owner of royalties due based upon the purchase of distribution media. Whether this is a primary intent or an effective intent does not matter. By avoiding the normal purchase processes intended to secure income for an entity based on their ownership of something, be it a sandwich or an intellectual property right, the result is still theft.
Third, since when is it illegal to store data on my hard drive?
Some information is illegal to keep on a hard drive. Possession of copyrighted works gained through illicit means, played or not, is illegal. If you own a bong, whether you use it or not, that possession may be illegal under drug paraphernalia laws. If someone gave you scans of photographs of secret military documents, possession of those scans -- opened or not -- would probably be illegal.
Possession of something can often be illegal, whether or not it's used to commit crimes. Whether the possession *should* be illegal is another story, and one that often winds up in court, where presumption of use is brought into play. After all, why would you have copies of all of those movies and songs which are clearly not from distribution media you own if you weren't going to listen to them?
It's called 'theft' through an extension of the act into monetary damages, specifically the royalties associated with the distribution of the copyrighted work. If you don't obtain it legally, then you're denying someone their due profits, and that can be termed theft.
Yes, it is a wordgame. Yes, it is more technically copyright violation. But yes, it is also theft.
Duck and cover wasn't for those in the immediate blast vicinity. It was for those far enough away that they could survive the initial shock, heat, and radiation effects, but still have to worry about flying debris. This is the same reason that people duck and cover in earthquake zones -- smaller targets for debris.
As to the oxygen masks and other gear aboard airliners, I don't know whether the gear has saved lives but at least it gives the passengers something to do in case of a sudden loss of cabin pressure while the pilots are diving for 10,000 feet. In smaller planes that safety gear (life rafts and such) have saved lives when they've gone down over water.
As was mentioned by someone else, these systems trip the power circuits before they go off. Unlike one of the other posters, though, we have no alternate UPS systems aside from the phone switch battery backups, which are kept a couple of feet off the ground in water-proof containers to minimize the chances of sparks from short circuits.
There are no manned prototypes as yet, but the article suggests cropdusting, cargo, and people transportation. One of the mentions it has is that a 200hp engine could lift about two tons, albeit at only 100kph.
Cantor Fitzgerald, the company hardest-hit in the attack with 700+ employees killed, had just that viewpoint. eSpeed, a subsidiary of CF, had all trading activities back up and running by the morning of Sept 13, due to the multiple locations and real-time backups being done on the network. My understanding is that the time from loss of connection with CF headquarters to full resumption of its trading activity around the world was about 46 hours.
Depending on whether there was a recent overhaul of the system, Halon is now illegal in most countries. Existing systems were grandfathered in, but new systems are prohibited from using it. I'm not sure which gas replaced it, but I understand that it's incredibly expensive, and not quite as effective. Of course, as has been pointed out, if the fire originated (and thus was fed from) elsewhere, the gas would have been useless once the storage tanks were empty.
I imagine they were well-insured. On the greed side of things, some major server company is going to report a small spike in Q4/02 server sales in Europe.
"Hi, we need a quote for a few hundred new servers and a couple dozen new routers and switches. Oh, and we need them *now*. Hello? Hello...? Dammit! Another sales rep fainted!"
Most NOCs I've been in have an oxygen-deprivation gas that's dispersed in the case of a fire (after a series of highly visible and audible warnings). The one I'm in right now seems to have gone the inexpensive (and arguably safer) way of a two-stage dry-pipe water sprinkler system where the pipes are usually dry (empty). In case of a smoke detection above a certain level, the pipes are "charged" (filled with water), and if the heat gets above a certain level, the sprinklers go off. Basically, the decision was made that if there's a fire, the equipment will probably need replacement anyway, so why not use sprinklers?
Personally, I'm not too sure of this route. I can understand it, from an environmental and human-safety perspective (the gasses eat the ozone layer, and you *really* don't want to inhale stuff that ties up oxygen at those rates), but if it ever happens here, it's going to be an awfully hurried mess to get everything back up and running in a reasonable timespan, even if the fire is only a small one that doesn't destroy the building.
Slashdot Mirror
There has to be some kind of high-capacity battery, or else it would be useless as part of a UPS.
I'm wondering if there are any grant or tax incentives to buy this, like there with some solar technologies.
The Hindenberg's hydrogen burned off in seconds. The big problem was the paint that used powdered aluminum, which was also electrically conductive. Add one significant spark (possible lightning) plus powdered aluminum (main volatile ingredient in the shuttle's solid-fuel boosters) and you get a big fire.
So yes, the hydrogen fears are minor. Had the Hindenberg been painted in a normal color, and not shiny silver, airships may have survived for some time to come.
This, of course, is what your air conditioner system is for. It's not there just to cool the place; the AC also dehumidifies the air. I suspect that most uses of these units would not drive up the humidity so fast that it would do much harm; by the time it gets there, you should have either powered off equipment, or turned on your diesel generator. (You do have one for your mission-critical equipment, don't you?)
I know the comment is somewhat facetious, but look at the number of wars in Europe compared to the number in North America, even including the Indian Wars. Looking at a smaller scale, consider the violent crime rates in the inner city with those in the extremely rural districts. You may have a more valid point here than you know.
Hey, we have to keep our war-mongerer-supported industries alive somehow. :)
Of course. What this means, though, is that there are also segments of the United States where there is room to continue spreading. I live in Southern California, and while I have the luxury of a shift that does not require me to drive in heavy traffic all that often, I do quickly tire of traffic when I do have to experience it. I'm considering moving in the next couple of years to a somewhat less fully-populated area, probably far from the current locale.
Europe, on the other hand, has considerably less expansion room, other than up. This means less room for new roads and highways, and dictates more spending on railways and busses, which can carry a higher proportion of people per volume. I'd love to see more rail here in SoCal. There was recently a plan to add a nice 35-mile rail system linking just north and central Orange County, with some spurs including around where I work and live. I was all for it -- except the central county NIMBYs have managed to scale it back to a mere 12-mile line, and it goes nowhere near where I work and live. Oh, well.
I don't know about easily, but it does burn hot and bright. This might be the perfect car for those that want to go out in the proverbial "blaze of glory", though.
US GDP: $10 trillion
German GDP: $2.2 trillion
Ratio: 4.5:1
US Population: 280M
German Population: 83M
Ratio: 3.4:1
Source: CIA World Factbook 2002
As for the defense budgets, need I remind you of the American forces in Germany? They may not be so necessary anymore, and on this basis alone (and not nationalism), I wouldn't mind seeing them come home, though that might well be a poor decision at some point in the future. I do wonder how it would affect Germany's economy, which I understand to be a little shaky at the moment, if the American forces did leave. I'm sure they contribute at least some to local money numbers. It would be an interesting experiment.
This may have something to do with population density enforcing a move to public transportation. I've spent the last few minutes using the CIA World Factbook to compare the US population and area to that of the European nations west of the old USSR boundaries. The conclusion?
USA
Population: 280,562,489
Land Area: 9,158,960 sq km
Population Density: 30.63 people per sq km
Europe
Population: 567,355,034 (202.22% of the United States)
Land Area: 5,372,251 (58.66% of the United States)
Population Density: 105.61 (344.76% of the United States)
Europe (excluding former Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia)
Population: 469,328,309 (167.28% of the United States)
Land Area: 4,425,959 (48.32% of the United States)
Population Density: 106.04 (346.17% of the United States)
When you have three and a half times the population density, you really have to get creative in how you handle transportation. To match this kind of density, the United States would need a population of 971,000,000. I imagine we'd come up with something in that case, too.
Having worked for an oil exploration company (Unocal), I know that this is already done. The efficiency with which existing wells are tapped is much higher than it used to be. Unocal does mostly off-shore work in the Gulf of Mexico, off of Indonesia, and some exploratory work off of West Africa (with smaller operations in many other locations), and I remember talking to some of the engineers about the process.
Some of the initial investigation is done using sounding from a boat to check out the sea bed and the underlying geology, and they usually return four reels of tape that contain more than a terabyte of information each. This is then run through computers to determine the true geology to great detail, and if it looks like there's a possible profit to it, further work is done to investigate whether a drill rig should be put into place. This is not a lightly-made decision by any means; these rigs can take more than a year to construct and are very expensive to operate. Every single one of them uses the latest available technology, so no two platforms -- even in the same field -- are quite alike because they are usually started at least a few months apart, and the state of the art advances even in that short time. Rigs are left in place until the very last possible barrel of oil has been extracted, and sometimes longer than that if a possibly promising new technology that can be refit to an existing rig becomes available. These rigs also are the endpoints for more and more wells, sometimes covering hundreds of square miles for a single rig with wells going off at all angles, decreasing the cost for tapping a given field.
Once a rig is no longer useful and there's no immediate hope of re-use, its wells are capped (though the caps can, of course, be removed later), the rig abandoned, and either scrapped or scuttled. If scrapped, the materials get reused, and if scuttled, the fish get a new home and place to play.
Much research is now going into investigating the heaviest crude oils. This stuff is thick beyond belief, and almost impossible to pump with current technology. Oil companies have been investigating how to do this for the last 25 years or more, starting around the energy crisis of the '70s when OPEC flexed its muscle, and have made some progress, but it's still not a profitable field at this point. I remember reading an article long ago that suggested that the US is sitting on a virtual sea of this ultra-thick oil that could allow for total domestic consumption, but because it can't be pumped, it sits there, waiting for the day when we get advanced and/or desperate enough to do something with it.
If only I had some mod points...
:)
And whoever rated that redundant apparently hasn't kept up with the latest in Slashdot posting styles.
They want to call your version of fair use a copyright violation, and, by extension, theft. Fair use has, itself, been redefined to some extent by the law over the last couple of decades. Is it correct? Probably not, or at least not in the way that the Supreme Court ruled, but until such time as the laws defining the current version of fair use are struck down or rewritten, it is theft. If you want to see it changed so much, go buy a laptop and a DVD, then go to your local police station, rip it in front of them, and then watch the movie. Once you've done that, and confessed to the police, then you can go to court and argue the merits of the law. I'll watch closely, and I'll applaud and support you -- I'll even donate to your legal defense fund -- but until you or someone else takes the law head-on and challenges it all the way and gets it overturned, the action is still illegal.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it allows the seller to define a product's value in terms of what he believes he deserves. Setting morality arguments aside for a moment, the market doesn't work this way: the seller does not get to assert what he thinks his profits should have been.
The market does work that way. If I own something, I am entitled to set a price for it, and therefore my level of profit. Whether or not anyone actually buys it is immaterial to this section of the process. If I want a profit of one dollar per item, I may set that price; I may also demand a profit of one million dollars per item. Will you buy it? Will he? Will she? It depends on what value the buyer associates with the product. Generally speaking, if I am the only source of a given product, and it's not critical to someone's survival (food, water, medicine, etc), my pricing decisions are completely legal.
Since the very income they are counting on from _you_ depends entirely on _your_ intent, it becomes an impossible construct.
By not purchasing it, you are, in effect, intending to deny the copyright owner of royalties due based upon the purchase of distribution media. Whether this is a primary intent or an effective intent does not matter. By avoiding the normal purchase processes intended to secure income for an entity based on their ownership of something, be it a sandwich or an intellectual property right, the result is still theft.
Third, since when is it illegal to store data on my hard drive?
Some information is illegal to keep on a hard drive. Possession of copyrighted works gained through illicit means, played or not, is illegal. If you own a bong, whether you use it or not, that possession may be illegal under drug paraphernalia laws. If someone gave you scans of photographs of secret military documents, possession of those scans -- opened or not -- would probably be illegal.
Possession of something can often be illegal, whether or not it's used to commit crimes. Whether the possession *should* be illegal is another story, and one that often winds up in court, where presumption of use is brought into play. After all, why would you have copies of all of those movies and songs which are clearly not from distribution media you own if you weren't going to listen to them?
It's called 'theft' through an extension of the act into monetary damages, specifically the royalties associated with the distribution of the copyrighted work. If you don't obtain it legally, then you're denying someone their due profits, and that can be termed theft.
Yes, it is a wordgame. Yes, it is more technically copyright violation. But yes, it is also theft.
mantle material is a lot denser than your head, which is basically water
:)
I'm assuming that you're not applying this statement to all Slashdot commenters?
Duck and cover wasn't for those in the immediate blast vicinity. It was for those far enough away that they could survive the initial shock, heat, and radiation effects, but still have to worry about flying debris. This is the same reason that people duck and cover in earthquake zones -- smaller targets for debris.
As to the oxygen masks and other gear aboard airliners, I don't know whether the gear has saved lives but at least it gives the passengers something to do in case of a sudden loss of cabin pressure while the pilots are diving for 10,000 feet. In smaller planes that safety gear (life rafts and such) have saved lives when they've gone down over water.
My mistake: 47 hours.
3 959,36807,0 0.asp
0 08S0007
1 192001.htm
Details on the recovery:
http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,
Some information on the scale of what eSpeed handles:
http://wstonline.com/story/mag/WST20011
Even Cantor Fitzgerald mentions it in their Q3/01 results summary:
http://www.cantor.com/articles/article1
As was mentioned by someone else, these systems trip the power circuits before they go off. Unlike one of the other posters, though, we have no alternate UPS systems aside from the phone switch battery backups, which are kept a couple of feet off the ground in water-proof containers to minimize the chances of sparks from short circuits.
There are no manned prototypes as yet, but the article suggests cropdusting, cargo, and people transportation. One of the mentions it has is that a 200hp engine could lift about two tons, albeit at only 100kph.
Cantor Fitzgerald, the company hardest-hit in the attack with 700+ employees killed, had just that viewpoint. eSpeed, a subsidiary of CF, had all trading activities back up and running by the morning of Sept 13, due to the multiple locations and real-time backups being done on the network. My understanding is that the time from loss of connection with CF headquarters to full resumption of its trading activity around the world was about 46 hours.
Depending on whether there was a recent overhaul of the system, Halon is now illegal in most countries. Existing systems were grandfathered in, but new systems are prohibited from using it. I'm not sure which gas replaced it, but I understand that it's incredibly expensive, and not quite as effective. Of course, as has been pointed out, if the fire originated (and thus was fed from) elsewhere, the gas would have been useless once the storage tanks were empty.
I imagine they were well-insured. On the greed side of things, some major server company is going to report a small spike in Q4/02 server sales in Europe.
"Hi, we need a quote for a few hundred new servers and a couple dozen new routers and switches. Oh, and we need them *now*. Hello? Hello...? Dammit! Another sales rep fainted!"
Most NOCs I've been in have an oxygen-deprivation gas that's dispersed in the case of a fire (after a series of highly visible and audible warnings). The one I'm in right now seems to have gone the inexpensive (and arguably safer) way of a two-stage dry-pipe water sprinkler system where the pipes are usually dry (empty). In case of a smoke detection above a certain level, the pipes are "charged" (filled with water), and if the heat gets above a certain level, the sprinklers go off. Basically, the decision was made that if there's a fire, the equipment will probably need replacement anyway, so why not use sprinklers?
Personally, I'm not too sure of this route. I can understand it, from an environmental and human-safety perspective (the gasses eat the ozone layer, and you *really* don't want to inhale stuff that ties up oxygen at those rates), but if it ever happens here, it's going to be an awfully hurried mess to get everything back up and running in a reasonable timespan, even if the fire is only a small one that doesn't destroy the building.