I wouldn't like to bet that going head-head up against a tribe of taller, more muscular meat eaters that eat game they catch themselves would end in a good way. You're quite likely to find yourself getting hunted and eaten, or atleast dead, even if you do have better weapons.
It may very well be that humans kept out of their way as much as possible; kinda like the way Cheetahs and Lions do. We'd be like the smaller and more delicate Cheetahs.
There's a difference between competition and killing people that aren't winning.
It seems to me that America tends to kill people. And that's probably why there's a high crime rate- people will usually prefer to do criminal acts to try to avoid dying.
I think this proves my point, I didn't understand the English translation anyway, and that was presumably grammatically correct Portugese. So the idea that everyone has to use better grammar to help Babelfish out- it's so broken, it makes little difference anyway.
'learning as the frenchman' - LOL. Sounds vaguely obscene!
What I am saying is that babelfish gives more accurate translations when you provide it with valid source material. The translations aren't perfect, but they're even LESS perfect when the source material "is teh sux0r."
Right. And you are seriously suggesting that people should be made to have better grammar to keep babelfish happy?
Everyone can totally bastardize the English language just as long as all the other English speakers can read it?
Yes. That seems fair to me. English is about transfer of meaning, not some great-pie-in-the-sky perfect language structure. In fact, if you really think it is, I don't think you really understand English at all- it's a total mutt of a language.
What if the meaning isn't clear to others, though?
That's rarely the case in my experience. Usually it's poor structuring of material that impedes that; not grammar and spelling. Spelling is practically never a problem; misspellings are usually phonetically close anyway. Grammar can occasionally make it hard to read, or even change the meaning; but mostly not.
What about the non-English speakers who make use of babelfish? How often do bad spelling and grammar prevent the exchange of information across language boundaries because those using the source language (English) just straight-up don't know how to use it?
Yeah right. Like Babelfish gets to dictate valid grammar. Like Babelfish understands even correct English enough to translate it. What colour is the sky in your world?
Perhaps you should have a particularly strong word with this peculiarly lazy asshole and they might spend the time to change their ways (although it seems unlikely in this case):
I don't know. You sound pretty facile to me. You don't care what people say unless people say it in the 'right' way, even when the meaning is clear.
So why should they care what facile people think about them?
At the end of the day, English is a pretty broken language. They actually hold competitions to see if anyone can spell the words! And essentially no one can!
'Laziness' relates to how much effort they put in, not how good their results are. If they have a learning impairment they may have to put ten times as much overall effort in to achieve the same results. And yet, if they've only applied five times the effort that you needed to do something- according to you they are lazy????
How is it you can't understand simple words like lazy? Are you too lazy to use the right words?
He said his learning disability applied primarily to spelling. He said that this sometimes gets in the way of grammar. However, someone around the age of 20 (since he said he was in school in the mid 80's) should know how to use punctuation and conjunctions to prevent run-on sentences - that is not complicated grammar for someone with a spelling disability.
It should not be; but he said he has a learning disability. People with learning disabilities learn more slowly, if at all, certain tasks. So, what you could do at 10, he might not manage till 15, or ever. And so on.
It doesn't mean he is lazy! He might be anyway of course, but the two are being horribly conflated by you.
You know, I'm wondering if you don't have a learning disability too. You're certainly slow on the uptake.
Are you as big a moron in real life as you appear on Slashdot? He just said he has a mild learning disability, and you're calling him lazy, because of the way he writes?
You deserve to get beaten with a clue stick, around the head, until you get a learning disability. Then everyone can call you lazy, and ask 'do you not care'?
"Writing is not entirely linear, though you do view it that way, and it's evident in your sentences that run on and on, concatenated with series of and's."
Um. You're not entirely blessed in this department yourself. Do you not care?
Consider:
"You seem to view writing as entirely linear. Certainly, your sentences tend to run on, with too many clauses."
That's shorter, and clearer, and the sentence length is minimal.
I looked at this a few years ago. The problem is that conventional autogyros are fairly slow and inefficient. The problem seems to be that the rotor cones backwards acting like a great big airbrake. So you have a limited top speed and miles per gallon is reasonably poor. Still, for sport flying they probably are a blast.
Ah, but there's a difference between safety and reliability. Adding complexity may make it less reliable, but can actually make it safer.
Cartercopter has less dead-man-zones than even a fixed wing aircraft- it can take off on an extremely short runway and if it loses power, can land pretty much anywhere. Fixed wing aircraft can only land on runways (or with extreme skill/luck on a road, but usually that involved damage.) Helicopters have wayyyy more moving parts and are susceptible to tail rotor failures, whereas Cartercopter isn't. Also, helicopters suffer from ring-vortex states; whereas gyrocopters avoid these modes.
About the only thing that might kill you would be if either rotor falls off or comes apart; but that's a pretty brutal failure, and would be heavily engineered against.
I guess it could mast bump at low speed, but the huge tail thing mitigates against that, and they're probably going to add computer controls to help stop that.
It's difficult to see how this could be a dangerous aircraft; although it's a very new one, so we'll see how it shapes up in practice.
My only real question about it is market; who needs an efficient VSTOL aircraft?
If Britain hadn't scrapped HOTOL, we would have had a replacement shuttle program years before the Columbia disaster, the ISS would likely have already been completed, and space technology would be easily a decade ahead of where it actually is. (We would also have commercial space travel by now, as HOTOL would have been damn good at that, as it was a design consideration.)
Nah, HOTOL had big problems. Not enough payload; CofM was too rearward.
Still, son-of-HOTOL: Skylon is looking mighty fine, it has avoided all the HOTOL issues, with higher performance, and the heat exchanger actually works!
There are still issues, but they're looking relatively minor. Apart from the money of course. That's the major one.:-)
You remind me of the mathematician jokes: "Ah a solution exists!"
You're missing the point. The point isn't to see if you can make a rotorcraft blade go supersonic- the point is to see if you can stop it!
When objects go supersonic, you get not only the shockwave issues, but also you get massive drag.
It's the drag that the Cartercopter is addressing- by flattening the blade right down, as well as spinning it slowly, they can cut the rotors drag by maybe an order of magnitude. Not only that, but because the body is flat with the airstream they get a lot less drag from the hub too.
The Cartercopter prototype is currently doing about 180-190 mph with 320 bhp. I did a quick check around, and a helicopter to do the same speed needs more like 600 bhp. If you think about it, that makes it twice as efficient.
And they estimate it should only cost about 10% more than a comparable sized fixed wing aircraft, with similar range, and all this with very short takeoff and landing; and probably safer than either fixed wing or helicopters to boot.
Yes, although after the helicopter has barrel rolled a few times, and the rotor has chopped up the vehicle into small pieces before spraying off in every direction and leaving your falling, severely injured body to plow into the ground, you might not think that it was such a good idea to try it anymore.
I fly radio controlled helicopters all the time and worked for Bell for quite some time. Although this is a great accomplishment, it doesn't really break the mu-1 barrier because it is a hybrid between a helicopter and an fixed wing airplane.
Um- without meaning to troll- if you really are so expert, how come you don't know the difference between an autogyro and a helicopter? Cartercopter is a cross between a fixed wing and an autogyro.
That aside, mu-1 does cause potential issues even with the Cartercopter, but they claim they have controlled it - for an example of issues they still get more lift on the forward wing than the trailing wing, and, worse, the lift is uneven across the wing, check the diagrams here.
The really nice thing about this is that they think they've managed to (at high speed anyway) avoid problems like "mast bumping".
There has been a helicopter along the same lines: Lockheed Cheyenne AH56A. Looks much more complicated and expensive though.
And in this case Cartercopter looks better the projected top speed of a Cartercopter may be very high indeed- 500+ mph if the engine has sufficient power. The current prototype probably can't do much over 200 mph, due to lack of power. The Cheyenne never went over 240 mph.
Yes, but I doubt very much if it is subsidised by a factor of 6x.
I checked, in America (sorry couldn't read the Brazilian websites), it looks like ethanol is subsidised by about 30%. So there's no way it can be a factor of 6 energy deficit- the farmers would go broke immediately.
I also found references to the plants in Brazil; apparently they do stuff like burn the stalks of the sugar cane to power the process to extract the sugars. They were saying that the Brazilian process is half the cost of the American one. So it wouldn't at all surprise me if the American process is a net energy deficit whilst the Brazilian one is in surplus.
Might work, particularly if you deliberately arranged for the US government's sugar beet price equal to, or above that of the cocaine.
Of course it would be rather open to abuse- I could rather imagine people from all around the world selling their sugar beet to Brazil; and them selling it on to the US government...:-)
Still, if you tied the buy quota to the size of the farmers field you'd do ok, together with spot checks (satellite?)
Nah. The real point behind all this is that in USA they make ethanol from corn, because they grow a lot of corn, and powerful lobbies have introduced a huge subsidy to use that source of ethanol to try to keep the cheap biofuel from Brazil off the market.
Of course the Brazilian biofuel comes from sugar beat and so forth, which actually is somewhat efficient and gives a net energy win; which is why Brazil have been able to run lots of their cars on it for quite a while now.
So what this paper is really saying is not that biofuel is a waste of time, but that 'The American Government are morons' with their stupid corn-based ethanol subsidy. But you knew that already, unless you're a corn farmer.
Did you forget that 'the feds' don't actually own Brazil? Doesn't look like Brazil has any problems having to produce biofuel with a net deficit of energy.
Looks like they grow sugarcane and other plants rather than corn, presumably grows slower, but it's probably easier and less energy intensive to process.
If it takes 6x as much energy to produce it, you would expect that it would cost more than 6x as much than the original fuel. So far as I'm aware it doesn't, nothing like. Ethanol costs about $1.50 a gallon... Compare that with the cost of gasoline for example; or aviation fuel (last time I checked, about $1/gallon- slightly cheaper).
Also, they've been making ethanol for vehicle fuel in Brazil for years... if it was so very uneconomic I wouldn't expect them to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
It may very well be that humans kept out of their way as much as possible; kinda like the way Cheetahs and Lions do. We'd be like the smaller and more delicate Cheetahs.
It seems to me that America tends to kill people. And that's probably why there's a high crime rate- people will usually prefer to do criminal acts to try to avoid dying.
IRC you seem to keep saying that.
3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510 58209 74944 59230 78164
http://www.angelfire.com/wa/zzaran/calvin.html
'learning as the frenchman' - LOL. Sounds vaguely obscene!
Right. And you are seriously suggesting that people should be made to have better grammar to keep babelfish happy?
Didn't think so.
Yes. That seems fair to me. English is about transfer of meaning, not some great-pie-in-the-sky perfect language structure. In fact, if you really think it is, I don't think you really understand English at all- it's a total mutt of a language.
What if the meaning isn't clear to others, though?
That's rarely the case in my experience. Usually it's poor structuring of material that impedes that; not grammar and spelling. Spelling is practically never a problem; misspellings are usually phonetically close anyway. Grammar can occasionally make it hard to read, or even change the meaning; but mostly not.
What about the non-English speakers who make use of babelfish? How often do bad spelling and grammar prevent the exchange of information across language boundaries because those using the source language (English) just straight-up don't know how to use it?
Yeah right. Like Babelfish gets to dictate valid grammar. Like Babelfish understands even correct English enough to translate it. What colour is the sky in your world?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=123976&cid=104 11747
The fucker couldn't even be bothered to capitalize any of it and had enormous run-on single-sentence paragraphs. What a lazy shit.
So why should they care what facile people think about them?
At the end of the day, English is a pretty broken language. They actually hold competitions to see if anyone can spell the words! And essentially no one can!
'Laziness' relates to how much effort they put in, not how good their results are. If they have a learning impairment they may have to put ten times as much overall effort in to achieve the same results. And yet, if they've only applied five times the effort that you needed to do something- according to you they are lazy????
How is it you can't understand simple words like lazy? Are you too lazy to use the right words?
It should not be; but he said he has a learning disability. People with learning disabilities learn more slowly, if at all, certain tasks. So, what you could do at 10, he might not manage till 15, or ever. And so on.
It doesn't mean he is lazy! He might be anyway of course, but the two are being horribly conflated by you.
You know, I'm wondering if you don't have a learning disability too. You're certainly slow on the uptake.
You deserve to get beaten with a clue stick, around the head, until you get a learning disability. Then everyone can call you lazy, and ask 'do you not care'?
"Writing is not entirely linear, though you do view it that way, and it's evident in your sentences that run on and on, concatenated with series of and's."
Um. You're not entirely blessed in this department yourself. Do you not care?
Consider: "You seem to view writing as entirely linear. Certainly, your sentences tend to run on, with too many clauses."
That's shorter, and clearer, and the sentence length is minimal.
I looked at this a few years ago. The problem is that conventional autogyros are fairly slow and inefficient. The problem seems to be that the rotor cones backwards acting like a great big airbrake. So you have a limited top speed and miles per gallon is reasonably poor. Still, for sport flying they probably are a blast.
Cartercopter has less dead-man-zones than even a fixed wing aircraft- it can take off on an extremely short runway and if it loses power, can land pretty much anywhere. Fixed wing aircraft can only land on runways (or with extreme skill/luck on a road, but usually that involved damage.) Helicopters have wayyyy more moving parts and are susceptible to tail rotor failures, whereas Cartercopter isn't. Also, helicopters suffer from ring-vortex states; whereas gyrocopters avoid these modes.
About the only thing that might kill you would be if either rotor falls off or comes apart; but that's a pretty brutal failure, and would be heavily engineered against.
I guess it could mast bump at low speed, but the huge tail thing mitigates against that, and they're probably going to add computer controls to help stop that.
It's difficult to see how this could be a dangerous aircraft; although it's a very new one, so we'll see how it shapes up in practice.
My only real question about it is market; who needs an efficient VSTOL aircraft?
Nah, HOTOL had big problems. Not enough payload; CofM was too rearward.
Still, son-of-HOTOL: Skylon is looking mighty fine, it has avoided all the HOTOL issues, with higher performance, and the heat exchanger actually works!
There are still issues, but they're looking relatively minor. Apart from the money of course. That's the major one. :-)
You're missing the point. The point isn't to see if you can make a rotorcraft blade go supersonic- the point is to see if you can stop it!
When objects go supersonic, you get not only the shockwave issues, but also you get massive drag.
It's the drag that the Cartercopter is addressing- by flattening the blade right down, as well as spinning it slowly, they can cut the rotors drag by maybe an order of magnitude. Not only that, but because the body is flat with the airstream they get a lot less drag from the hub too.
The Cartercopter prototype is currently doing about 180-190 mph with 320 bhp. I did a quick check around, and a helicopter to do the same speed needs more like 600 bhp. If you think about it, that makes it twice as efficient.
And they estimate it should only cost about 10% more than a comparable sized fixed wing aircraft, with similar range, and all this with very short takeoff and landing; and probably safer than either fixed wing or helicopters to boot.
Yes, although after the helicopter has barrel rolled a few times, and the rotor has chopped up the vehicle into small pieces before spraying off in every direction and leaving your falling, severely injured body to plow into the ground, you might not think that it was such a good idea to try it anymore.
Um- without meaning to troll- if you really are so expert, how come you don't know the difference between an autogyro and a helicopter? Cartercopter is a cross between a fixed wing and an autogyro.
That aside, mu-1 does cause potential issues even with the Cartercopter, but they claim they have controlled it - for an example of issues they still get more lift on the forward wing than the trailing wing, and, worse, the lift is uneven across the wing, check the diagrams here.
The really nice thing about this is that they think they've managed to (at high speed anyway) avoid problems like "mast bumping".
There has been a helicopter along the same lines: Lockheed Cheyenne AH56A. Looks much more complicated and expensive though.
And in this case Cartercopter looks better the projected top speed of a Cartercopter may be very high indeed- 500+ mph if the engine has sufficient power. The current prototype probably can't do much over 200 mph, due to lack of power. The Cheyenne never went over 240 mph.
I checked, in America (sorry couldn't read the Brazilian websites), it looks like ethanol is subsidised by about 30%. So there's no way it can be a factor of 6 energy deficit- the farmers would go broke immediately.
I also found references to the plants in Brazil; apparently they do stuff like burn the stalks of the sugar cane to power the process to extract the sugars. They were saying that the Brazilian process is half the cost of the American one. So it wouldn't at all surprise me if the American process is a net energy deficit whilst the Brazilian one is in surplus.
Of course it would be rather open to abuse- I could rather imagine people from all around the world selling their sugar beet to Brazil; and them selling it on to the US government... :-)
Still, if you tied the buy quota to the size of the farmers field you'd do ok, together with spot checks (satellite?)
Of course the Brazilian biofuel comes from sugar beat and so forth, which actually is somewhat efficient and gives a net energy win; which is why Brazil have been able to run lots of their cars on it for quite a while now.
So what this paper is really saying is not that biofuel is a waste of time, but that 'The American Government are morons' with their stupid corn-based ethanol subsidy. But you knew that already, unless you're a corn farmer.
Looks like they grow sugarcane and other plants rather than corn, presumably grows slower, but it's probably easier and less energy intensive to process.
Also, they've been making ethanol for vehicle fuel in Brazil for years... if it was so very uneconomic I wouldn't expect them to do that.
As in, what gives? I smell politics.
Yes, that's exactly why I put all my releases under the GPL! ;-)