Getting back to Nessie (which I don't think exists), there is the Open ROV underwater drones http://www.openrov.com/ [openrov.com] that don't cost that much so maybe we can get lots more "eyeballs" looking what really is down in that water.
Since I've probably spent more hours swimming in Loch Ness than you (or indeed, almost anyone else in this thread), I happen to know that the water is pretty murky. As in, you'd be lucky to see your own feet if you were treading water. While it may be less murky deeper down (seen that when I've been SCUBA diving ; it's low density peat-rich river water coming down onto the more dense loch water ; here the density difference is from water temperature, not salinity), the actual volume of water you'd be able to survey would be negligible.
For a bulk survey, sonar is far and away the best technique. And that question was answered in the 1970s.
I've considered OpenROV for other projects. I wouldn't waste my time or money for it for a dead question like Nessie.
there should be an increase in new pictures of her roughly equivalent to the increased proportion of camera-hours (the number of hours that people with cameras or mounted video cameras are watching) around Loch Ness.
If, indeed, they're camera-hours looking at the loch. most of the grockles are taking photos of each other, not of the loch itself. And people are generally not very good at observing things that they're not expecting (which is the big hole at the centre of the "many eyes" hypothesis of code review).
I doubt that the number of camera-hours looking at the loch is much higher than it ever was.
So... three weeks later after getting back to Nowhereville, Countyshire, someone notices that there's an odd looking wave on the loch in one of the pictures. Well, great, but without there being a number of other shots of the same scene, from different viewpoints and times there is little chance of actually extracting wave motion characteristics, which were some of the arguments used in the 1970s for interpreting oddities recorded by the film cameras.
I do know what you mean. Once, courtesy of a bike tyre that was shedding rubber all over the place, I had to cycle from Fort Augustus to the bike shop in Inverness in August. Absolute fucking nightmare. But, to be honest, I blame the fucking car-dwelling grockles, not the relatively small amount of Nessie-ism.
I would be interested in some sources to indicate who is recycling and since when.
I was triaging computers (well, signal conditioner I/O cards, and boards from backplane systems) for "repair" or "recycle" back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Because we could not get replacements, and the "new wonderful" system was 3 years overdue. The recycling company paid more if we levered the chips out of their sockets and bagged the stripped boards separately from the cards.
The day that one of our technicians attended a barn sale somewhere in Nebraska and acquired a hundred or so 8-channel chart recorder units extended the global lifetime of that system by at least 2 years, or a couple of thousand man-years.
(a) Producing electricity from fossil fuels at large thermal generating plants and using that electricity to move a car is far more efficient than burning gasoline in a car to make a car move
"Far more efficient"? A large fossil fuel plant is in the 30s of % of efficiency. Car engines are slowly climbing into the 40s. By the time you factor in transmission losses, there's not a lot of difference.
There are plenty of good arguments for switching transportation from fossil fuels to electrical systems, but that's not a very good argument.
the traditional hand blowers we already knew were worse than paper towels.
THAT's the thing that people should be aware of - the hand blowers (technically the "sack half the toilet attendants, because they don't need to fill up the paper towel dispensers any more" machines) were shown to throw significant amounts of skin flakes (and attendant bacteria) around in the 1990s, and to do so far more than paper towels. Consequently, in a public wash room, one bad hand washer (90% + of people are bad (ineffective) at hand washing) will spread their colonic bacteria around into the air, walls and flat surfaces of the wash room in a matter of minutes, and it will persist until the next time the room is deep-cleaned (who cleans the ceiling?). In a less public setting, you've got more control.
All that said, the epidemic of people dropping dead of "shit in the lung" accurately estimates the true risk. I've not heard of a single case. Probably because we've all been getting shit in our mouths since we were able to put our fingers into our mouths. Our immune systems are actually not too bad at common shit like this.
So how are they slinging shit around, unless someone sat on one and performed a wet runny colon evacuation?
Someone is letting their emotions ("disgust response", specifically) interfere with their rationality.
But hey, I've earned a living working with biohazard material, and still routinely work with moderately radioactive material and explosives. I take appropriate precautions. Not excessive precautions.
South Africa had a large F-T system in the days of Apartheid and it is still running. They've recently completed laying a 700-odd km pipeline to deliver gas from 3 onshore Mozambique gas fields to the F-T plant ("gas-to-liquids" is the phrase they use), and are in the commissioning and field start-up phases.
I must remember to ask the wife if she has powered up the iPad we were given last year. I certainly don't want to give them my credit card details for that, and I don't think she could handle the user interface.
If no one on the team was already aware of Larry Niven's work -- unlikely -- surely someone has dropped them a copy of "A Gift From Earth", etc. by now.
"The Mote in God's Eye" is also very relevant, given the light beam acceleration.
It is incredible (literal sense) that no-one in the team is familiar with these - and many other - works. Hard SF is a popular relaxation amongst both scientists and engineers.
I was just trying to figure out if the temperature ranges for 3d-printer feedstock were close enough to the melting points of the conventional (i.e. 3-4 thousand year old) "lost wax" process, to just go straight from 3d-printing into the established pipeline. I would guess so.
make negative of wax model in plaster
No, not "plaster" in the conventional sense, as "plaster of Paris" (calcium sulphate hemi-hydrate, hydrated to gypsum, calcium sulphate di-hydrate). The gypsum would decompose (to the hemi-hydrate at about 200 centigrade, and to anhydrite a hundred or so above that) as soon as you poured in the molten "white metal" (M.P. ~400C), "bronze" (M.P. ~650C), "silver" (M.P. ~890C, for "sterling" silver), "gold" (M.P. ~1000C, depending on grade).
It may come as a white powder which you mix with water and then sets, but it's not going to be a "plaster". I'd guess a cement-based mix, but there are other possibilities.
who gives a shit about the Earth's moon and planets, we'll never be able to visit them.....
-- some moron like you who doesn't know what is technically possible
More importantly, it's the people who do give a shit, and who don't really care about what is "technically impossible," because that only encourages the invention of new technologies. Remember - even into the 1940s, people were decrying Goddard as an idiot for thinking you could reach orbit with a liquid-fuelled rocket.
Kepler has exceeded it's mission justification by a factor of "several". It may not have exceeded your expectations - if your expectations for the mission included getting more blow jobs from green-haired aliens than William Shatner - but it has certainly far exceeded it's planned mission, to the point that NASA have been bitching (quietly) about the cost of keeping all these missions that are just running and running and running (and running and running... ), running. "cost" not just being in dollars and cents, but more restricted resources like DSN communications time.
Inertial sensing gyros, in the year 2016, *are not gimballed*.
From the Wiki page, Kepler was initially planned to launch in 2006, so design and hardware freeze would have been 2003 if not earlier. It takes a long time to get hardware into space. IIRC, the last (as in final) servicing mission to the Hubble installed a 486-class processor to upgrade the 386-class processor that had been working for the previous 20-odd years.
Almost every available unit for the last 30 years has been a strapdown system.
So, there are a couple of spacecraft, if not more, still using gimballed gyros for inertial sensing?
Also... integration has at least one potential cause of problems. (I saw this in inertial guidance for an ROV recently, which they use to count turns on the daughtercraft umbilical. Quite an important parameter.) If the original software design didn't envisage completing 1000 revolutions (pick a number) and that code is re-used 10 years later in a spacecraft which just turns and turns and turns... potential overflow bugs and all sorts of bad stuff.
That sort of thing is one of the reasons that hardware and software for spaceflight is expensive. Often it's quicker to build for yourself from scratch than to get the access to the internals of COTS equipment to look for assumptions like this.
What little computer industry America still has (people like Cisco network infrastructure, perhaps some Dells, high-end HP servers, that sort of thing) will suffer as people consider the security hazards of buying equipment from people controlled by American TLAs. Doubtless there will also remain concerns about Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese etc sourcing, but at least their courts and governments haven't come out in public and publicly demanded that backdoors be installed.
Plus, with vendors with multiple, non-overlapping commitments, you have a better chance of detecting nefarious activity. Viz : if you suspect your Chinese router of talking to Beijing, then you put the test example downstream of a Taiwanese router and use that to look for back-channel traffic. You don't expect the Chinese and Taiwanese TLAs to be cooperating with each other, do you?
I never really trusted American equipment - going back to the 1980s when I first started to buy computing equipment. But since IBM sold their manufacturing business to Lenovo, I've been happy to buy them. I ordered a new laptop last night (an X-200 - flashed with Libreboot, of course).
who says it would require "American companies to build a backdoor...
Next step, Americans stop buying American computers. Already, no-one in the rest of the world considers American computers to be safe for anything other than games.
To survive, the remains of the American computer industry will need to get international, and get their security management out of the country, out of American citizenship, and out of control by American bodies. I don't see them doing that. So this is another in the death-of-a-thousand-cuts inflicted by the American government on the American computing industry.
Which is why they now want to ban 'burner phones' by making the vendor take your details plus the phone's ID...
This, in a country where fraudulent ID is rampant amongst the late teenage to early-20s population who want to get a drink. If you add another million ID checks daily to the daily work load of millions of ID checks carried out in a sloppy, slapdash, incompetent and uncaring manner by unmotivated people... then you create another million opportunities for slapdash incompetent and uncaring ID checks.
Slashdot Mirror
Since I've probably spent more hours swimming in Loch Ness than you (or indeed, almost anyone else in this thread), I happen to know that the water is pretty murky. As in, you'd be lucky to see your own feet if you were treading water. While it may be less murky deeper down (seen that when I've been SCUBA diving ; it's low density peat-rich river water coming down onto the more dense loch water ; here the density difference is from water temperature, not salinity), the actual volume of water you'd be able to survey would be negligible.
For a bulk survey, sonar is far and away the best technique. And that question was answered in the 1970s.
I've considered OpenROV for other projects. I wouldn't waste my time or money for it for a dead question like Nessie.
If, indeed, they're camera-hours looking at the loch. most of the grockles are taking photos of each other, not of the loch itself. And people are generally not very good at observing things that they're not expecting (which is the big hole at the centre of the "many eyes" hypothesis of code review).
I doubt that the number of camera-hours looking at the loch is much higher than it ever was.
So ... three weeks later after getting back to Nowhereville, Countyshire, someone notices that there's an odd looking wave on the loch in one of the pictures. Well, great, but without there being a number of other shots of the same scene, from different viewpoints and times there is little chance of actually extracting wave motion characteristics, which were some of the arguments used in the 1970s for interpreting oddities recorded by the film cameras.
I do know what you mean. Once, courtesy of a bike tyre that was shedding rubber all over the place, I had to cycle from Fort Augustus to the bike shop in Inverness in August. Absolute fucking nightmare. But, to be honest, I blame the fucking car-dwelling grockles, not the relatively small amount of Nessie-ism.
Oh, hang on, the Vietnamese won.
I was triaging computers (well, signal conditioner I/O cards, and boards from backplane systems) for "repair" or "recycle" back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Because we could not get replacements, and the "new wonderful" system was 3 years overdue. The recycling company paid more if we levered the chips out of their sockets and bagged the stripped boards separately from the cards.
The day that one of our technicians attended a barn sale somewhere in Nebraska and acquired a hundred or so 8-channel chart recorder units extended the global lifetime of that system by at least 2 years, or a couple of thousand man-years.
"Far more efficient"? A large fossil fuel plant is in the 30s of % of efficiency. Car engines are slowly climbing into the 40s. By the time you factor in transmission losses, there's not a lot of difference.
There are plenty of good arguments for switching transportation from fossil fuels to electrical systems, but that's not a very good argument.
Let's not pussy-foot around here.
No, it's not funny. It's facing a rational and intelligent enemy who understands what they want and how to achieve it.
THAT's the thing that people should be aware of - the hand blowers (technically the "sack half the toilet attendants, because they don't need to fill up the paper towel dispensers any more" machines) were shown to throw significant amounts of skin flakes (and attendant bacteria) around in the 1990s, and to do so far more than paper towels. Consequently, in a public wash room, one bad hand washer (90% + of people are bad (ineffective) at hand washing) will spread their colonic bacteria around into the air, walls and flat surfaces of the wash room in a matter of minutes, and it will persist until the next time the room is deep-cleaned (who cleans the ceiling?). In a less public setting, you've got more control.
All that said, the epidemic of people dropping dead of "shit in the lung" accurately estimates the true risk. I've not heard of a single case. Probably because we've all been getting shit in our mouths since we were able to put our fingers into our mouths. Our immune systems are actually not too bad at common shit like this.
Someone is letting their emotions ("disgust response", specifically) interfere with their rationality.
But hey, I've earned a living working with biohazard material, and still routinely work with moderately radioactive material and explosives. I take appropriate precautions. Not excessive precautions.
South Africa had a large F-T system in the days of Apartheid and it is still running. They've recently completed laying a 700-odd km pipeline to deliver gas from 3 onshore Mozambique gas fields to the F-T plant ("gas-to-liquids" is the phrase they use), and are in the commissioning and field start-up phases.
I must remember to ask the wife if she has powered up the iPad we were given last year. I certainly don't want to give them my credit card details for that, and I don't think she could handle the user interface.
Catch-22.
"The Mote in God's Eye" is also very relevant, given the light beam acceleration.
It is incredible (literal sense) that no-one in the team is familiar with these - and many other - works. Hard SF is a popular relaxation amongst both scientists and engineers.
No, not "plaster" in the conventional sense, as "plaster of Paris" (calcium sulphate hemi-hydrate, hydrated to gypsum, calcium sulphate di-hydrate). The gypsum would decompose (to the hemi-hydrate at about 200 centigrade, and to anhydrite a hundred or so above that) as soon as you poured in the molten "white metal" (M.P. ~400C), "bronze" (M.P. ~650C), "silver" (M.P. ~890C, for "sterling" silver), "gold" (M.P. ~1000C, depending on grade).
It may come as a white powder which you mix with water and then sets, but it's not going to be a "plaster". I'd guess a cement-based mix, but there are other possibilities.
More importantly, it's the people who do give a shit, and who don't really care about what is "technically impossible," because that only encourages the invention of new technologies. Remember - even into the 1940s, people were decrying Goddard as an idiot for thinking you could reach orbit with a liquid-fuelled rocket.
Kepler has exceeded it's mission justification by a factor of "several". It may not have exceeded your expectations - if your expectations for the mission included getting more blow jobs from green-haired aliens than William Shatner - but it has certainly far exceeded it's planned mission, to the point that NASA have been bitching (quietly) about the cost of keeping all these missions that are just running and running and running (and running and running ... ), running. "cost" not just being in dollars and cents, but more restricted resources like DSN communications time.
NASA are working on that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
From the Wiki page, Kepler was initially planned to launch in 2006, so design and hardware freeze would have been 2003 if not earlier. It takes a long time to get hardware into space. IIRC, the last (as in final) servicing mission to the Hubble installed a 486-class processor to upgrade the 386-class processor that had been working for the previous 20-odd years.
So, there are a couple of spacecraft, if not more, still using gimballed gyros for inertial sensing?
Also ... integration has at least one potential cause of problems. (I saw this in inertial guidance for an ROV recently, which they use to count turns on the daughtercraft umbilical. Quite an important parameter.) If the original software design didn't envisage completing 1000 revolutions (pick a number) and that code is re-used 10 years later in a spacecraft which just turns and turns and turns ... potential overflow bugs and all sorts of bad stuff.
That sort of thing is one of the reasons that hardware and software for spaceflight is expensive. Often it's quicker to build for yourself from scratch than to get the access to the internals of COTS equipment to look for assumptions like this.
Do exactly the same, but ten times as much every day.
Not destroying the planet. Just rendering it unfit for habitation by breeders and the innocent.
Plus, with vendors with multiple, non-overlapping commitments, you have a better chance of detecting nefarious activity. Viz : if you suspect your Chinese router of talking to Beijing, then you put the test example downstream of a Taiwanese router and use that to look for back-channel traffic. You don't expect the Chinese and Taiwanese TLAs to be cooperating with each other, do you?
I never really trusted American equipment - going back to the 1980s when I first started to buy computing equipment. But since IBM sold their manufacturing business to Lenovo, I've been happy to buy them. I ordered a new laptop last night (an X-200 - flashed with Libreboot, of course).
Next step, Americans stop buying American computers. Already, no-one in the rest of the world considers American computers to be safe for anything other than games.
To survive, the remains of the American computer industry will need to get international, and get their security management out of the country, out of American citizenship, and out of control by American bodies. I don't see them doing that. So this is another in the death-of-a-thousand-cuts inflicted by the American government on the American computing industry.
This, in a country where fraudulent ID is rampant amongst the late teenage to early-20s population who want to get a drink. If you add another million ID checks daily to the daily work load of millions of ID checks carried out in a sloppy, slapdash, incompetent and uncaring manner by unmotivated people ... then you create another million opportunities for slapdash incompetent and uncaring ID checks.
Hey, what's your beef against the horse?