SCO isn't SCO. Santa Cruz did the deal with Novell. Santa Cruz sold the Unix "business" to Caldera. When Santa Cruz changed their name to Tarantella, Caldera jumped in and changed its name to SCO (not Santa Cruz Operation, just SCO). Novell never signed anything over to SCO. SCO just pretends to be Santa Cruz when it benefits them.
I'm sure that I cannot be alone in being sceptical of the claims made by the loudest communicators on both (I concede there may be more than two) sides of the debate.
"Does the spirit of scientific scepticism really require that I remain forever open-minded to denialist humbug until it's shown to be wrong?
My answer to this has to be:
"I am equally sceptical of denialist and non-denialist humbug until it's shown to be not wrong".
Honestly, for the life of me, I cannot think of a better definition of scientist than "sceptic". Recording observations and organising them in a logical sequence in order to disprove a theoretical construct used to be known as science when I was a lad. At the end of your writings, you listed chapters of all your inaccuracies and published with the humblest appeal: "I have failed to disprove this notion. Please review my data and model and assist me to disprove it. I am sceptical of the conclusions."
I admit openly that I am sceptical of everything I have read on climate. Should I report somewhere for a lynching?
Does simply ignoring the computer count as a manual override?
In November 1983, a Colombian jumbo jet enroute from Paris to Bogotà was making a scheduled stop in Madrid. Landing in the dark, the crew made a mistake with the instrument landing system, turned on to an incorrect track and flew into a hill. An analysis of the cockpit voice recorder revealed that some minutes before the crash, an audible ground proximity warning system had told the crew, "Pull up! Pull up!" The pilot replied "Shut up, gringo."
Those were his last words. All 20 crew and 161 of the 172 passengers were killed.
The sprockets that drive the odometer and speedometer are typically nylon. They don't bear much load and are well lubricated. They can wear or fail in a number of different circumstances. I had one replaced with one that had a different tooth count. Gave me great fuel economy as I was driving around at about 10mph less than I thought I was.
" What sort of opportunities are there for American citizens to work abroad?"
Lots of opportunities with this outfit:
[URL]http://www.marines.com/page/usmc.jsp[/URL]
"Any hassles I should know about?" Nothing we can't train you for son.
On a more serious note, if you are under 29 there is a class of working VISA available in many countries that allows you to work there for up to 12 months with few restrictions.
Seriously a "jet-pack" enables you to do many things that can't be done as well by auto gyro.
I can see a use for these in search and inspection roles. It currently claims to have 30 mins endurance. If so, I can imagine them being very useful for a low search in rough terrain, under a forest canopy, over gorges, rivers, and generally hard going. If you need to put down and check something more closely, you can do it instantly and then resume the search just as fast. No need to call in a ground team.
Missing person from ski lodge? Strap on the pack and go take a quick look. Snow is the kind of obstacle that can be better traversed from 200 feet up. Cheaper to keep one of these things on standby than a helicopter.
Its qualities make it ideal for pipeline inspection. Low and slow where needed, across all sorts of terrain. Power line inspection is also a possibility. Boundary riding? Mineral exploration?
I am sure it would be far more useful with a semi-autonomous flight controller, fly by wire in effect. More stable, able to set for hover, automatic deployment of safety chute at system failure etc. These things could push the price up 5 times and it would still be a cheap alternative in many applications.
This and whatever may spawn from it have a great future from what I can see.
That is precisely what this (ADS-B) does. At the moment, when not in radar coverage, the pilot uses the radio to report his position which he reads from his GPS (or other instruments). ATC copy this down and track his movement from these position updates. Now the problem with this is that by the time he reads out the position and ATC copies it down, the aircraft has actually traveled several miles.
This is the start of the problem. You don't actually have a pinpoint position to work with. You actually have a circle of probability which is combination of equipment and reporting errors. You could fit a lot of planes on a 100 mile route if you only had to keep them a mile apart and you had constant, pinpoint instant updating position information.
After getting the position report, ATC now have an expanding bubble of possible positions the aircraft could actually occupy until they get the next voice update which might be 30 minutes hence. This could end up expanding to 30 miles wide and 120 miles long before it is updated again. (Updating resets the probability circle back to just a couple of miles again). To keep aircraft from colliding you have to separate the the great big probability of position areas, not just a couple of points. Two aircraft could occupy 200 miles of airspace and it is now full; room for no more.
ADS removes the pilot and the ATC from the position reporting chain. The aircraft equipment just codes and sends the position directly to the ATC equipment. The position then automagically just appears on the controller's screen (with a display note saying that it is ADS derived). In busy airspace these reports can be generated only seconds apart pulling that circular error of probability back in to only a couple of miles with each update. You can now fit 50 planes into the airspace where you might have put only a couple before.
RADAR does exactly the same thing as ADS. The ground equipment asks the plane where it is and it sends back a reflection (primary) or a coded pulse (secondary) which is then displayed on a controllers screen. The difference with ADS is that instead of an enormously expensive piece of ground equipment to decode and receive the signal it can all be done on a regular vhf/uhf radio. If you add another radio antenna to a cell tower nobody cares. You can also utilise the existing ground network to carry the signal back to the ATC centre. You don't have to pay techs to install and maintain your own proprietary equipment.
Try building a couple of hundred multi-million dollar radar dishes across the landscape and every kook, luny, luddite and portable Faraday cage wearing weirdo will be out to stop you and protect the speckled barn toad as a bonus.
The huge advantages of ADS are that it is accurate, cheap and has a small ground footprint. It can be adapted for long range (hf) and satellite updating for oceanic sectors. It's all win. If someone asks "what will do when it breaks?" Well look out he window, we're doing it now.
OMG I can't decide which post is the worst in this littany of ignorance, but this one....
If you bothered to read the article you linked to you would note that MODE S is just an add on and only works in radar coverage. ADS is being rolled still where it is of the greatest benefit - beyond radar coverage.
The same company that is providing the MODE S gear has a reall big contract - providing the continuing roll out of ADS-B ground stations:
"Thales has previously supplied TAAATS and is currently delivering a nationwide network of ADS-B ground stations for Upper Airspace surveillance across areas of continental Australia outside the range of conventional radars."
As for the astounding number of people that can't get it through intuition:
Most of the world is not under radar coverage. A small small fraction of it is. What happens should the radar fail? Um, traffic is separated by the same means that is used where there is no radar coverage. What happens when GPS fails (it is already used for separating aircraft)? Strangely, traffic is separated by the same means that was used before there was GPS. Amazing.
No you're not missing anything. The altimeter provides the altitude readout and it's just sent as a "sentence" along with the other information. Altitude data is already encoded from the altimeter and sent to the ground based radar as part of a coded signal from a transponder in the aircraft. This has been the way for decades. There is no need to get altitude from GPS. Position data from GPS is another thing. It is theoretically more accurate than a radar position, but there a bunch of innaccuracies that have to be built into a 'tolerance" that has to be applied to the aircraft position as reported.
TCAS is a traffic collision avoidance device also in use today that transmits altitude data between aircraft. Again the data comes from the altimeter.
Automatic Dependant Surveillance (ADS) data provides position (from INS or GPS) and altitude from the altimeter. The data can be sent via radio link or satellite. The amount of times per minute (or hour) that this data is updated to the ground station provides the basis for seperation of aircraft. If you update quite often you can run planes just a few miles apart. If you update every thirty minutes or so by expensive satellite links (trans-ocean) you might have to run the aircraft 100 miles apart. Some of the cost is in the aircraft but much of the cost is in ground station receivers, computers to interpret the data, displays to show the aircraft positions and then training for everybody along the line to use it.
The benefit is in better routing and less time in the "stack" when you arrive. Less fuel burnt is a cost saving but also think in total cost per minute of crewing and running a 747. It costs a bundle to switch to this but the longer term savings are far greater.
Re:What's good for the goose...
on
Explosives Camp
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
LOL. If you're going to deliver a lecture at least get your facts together.
it's ok for us to have nukes and not allow Iran/NK/China to have them.
China does not need your "permission" to have nuclear weapons.
They would use them.
They seem to have managed to avoid using them over the past 50 years somehow despite your dire warning. Still, only one country has launched nuclear strikes against another. Hint: It wasn't China.
and probably won't considering all the fighting we do now is against rogue undercover militias
Most reassuring, especially for the rogue undercover militia governments of Panama, Nicaragua, Grenada and Iraq.
I'm sure it's possible to be patriotic without being culturally blind or xenophobic.
Dunno where this stuff starts. I watched Clockwork Orange in a cinema in Townsville not long after it was released. There was a censorship board for a short while in the Joh years (which ended 2 decades ago) but it was put in place as a purely political stunt and never did anything noteworthy that I can remember. Joh made himself famous in 1969 for banning "Hair" which wasn't planned to be on stage in Queensland anyway. I think Oh Calcutta did go on and it had several nude scenes. He excelled himself by insisting some PNG dancers cover their breasts during their dance at a cultural exposition. Probably didn't like those National Geographic boobs any more than the rest of us!
Most of the stuff you've heard about Queensland and censorship is however purely urban myth.
PS There were a few "funny" cops that tried prosecuting a few shows as "indecent". Rodney Rude was prosecuted for saying cock on stage. His response was to stand there and just keep saying it over and over and over. His Qld audiences couldn't get enough of it.
I'm not certain of the tech involved here but most of the concepts seem to be established. Injecting a cooling agent into the cylinder independently and directly to boost the charge has been used for 60-70 years. Water-meths and nitrous oxide are well proven technologies.
Lots of sites about that give some history on it. Here's one off the top of Google search:
and a lift of what it has to say:
A brief history: Water injection was evaluated scientifically in the 1930's by H. Ricardo who demonstrated that one can basically double the power output of an engine using water/methanol. The first widespread use was during WWII on supercharged and turbocharged aircraft. In 1942, the German Luftwaffe increased the horsepower of the Focke-Wulf 190D-9 fighter aircraft from 1776HP to 2240HP using 50/50% water/methanol injection. The allies soon followed by fitting the P51 Mustang and other high performance aircraft with water/methanol injection. Following the war, the turboprop aircraft industry used water/methanol injection and called it the "automatic power reserve system (APR)" for use in hot or high altitude take off. It surfaced again in the 60's when GM used a system on the OEM turbo Corvair. It was used effectively in Formula 1 before being banned for adding too much power. Bombadier's E-tech outboard engines (no link - horror flash site) use computer timed injection to control charge and lubrication to get greater efficiency and cleanliness from 2-stroke engines.
Again I am not sure which measures of efficiency are being spoken of here, but even a couple of percent reduction of fuel burnt would mean astronomical savings in money, easing of political pressure and of course conserving the resource itself.
They have a solid policy of responding to any use of "M$" with a tantrum any 2 year old would be proud of. Poor little weenies. Of course they could be getting paid for it so I for one am willing to help them earn a few coppers, here you go:
If I can build on this a bit, how about patent applications be absolutely and simply defined? Well even a little more than they are now perhaps:
1. Only a physical object actually demonstrated in a full working condition, accompanied by documentation completely describing its operation and construction, can be protected by patent.
2. An accompanying statement must describe the innovative nature of the object.
3. A public benefit statement quantify the advantage to the people of granting an exclusive monopoly to the inventor.
4. If the invention uses software, all source code and all application programming interfaces are required to be published as part of the documentation.
Patents cannot be granted for longer than seven years and cannot be extended by any means.
On software:
Software has the protection of copyright and trade secret, it cannot be patented. Software that has been granted the protection by a current patent may continue for another 3.5 years, provided that full source code and APIs are published (not protected until published) and that such source code becomes public domain at the end of the period.
The optimist in me believes it should take months before the lawyers corrupt this approach.:)
I don't know, but wouldn't rocket thrust be calculated in Poundals (an old demon from high school physics that eluded me even back then)? I would imagine trying to explain the units and the calculations to an investigating committee could be fun.
Agent Orange (Blue White Pink Green Purple and whatever) were not weapons. They were herbicides. They were not dropped. They were sprayed by transport aircraft converted into giant cropdusters.
The "defoliants" were used to remove the jungle cover in a few areas in Viet-Nam where VC/NVA activity was prolific and hidden under the forest canopy. It is arguable that it achieved its purpose. It was "policy" not to spray it directly onto population. The lingering after affect is less about poisons than about the totally denuded terrain left behind, that saw topsoil torn away and lost in the following monsoons. Wet deserts. I don't know if the areas have recovered yet - maybe?
Agent Orange was simply a mix of 2.4.5-T and 2.4-D which are common farm chemicals used to this today as weedicides. (Haven't seen 2.4.5-T around lately, it may have been pulled). They really work well to kill off broadleaf plants (vines) amongst grass crops like sorghum and maize. They are systemic and apparently in effect starve the plants. As far as the literature that I have read relates, these chemicals do not have any such effect on animals and more to the point - humans. They would almost certainly be friendlier than spraying with diesel fuel and kerosene which was also tried. The great poison debate that arose over Agent Orange came from a contaminant - dioxin.
Apparently dioxin can be produced as an impurity in the manufacturing process. The chemical companies supposedly monitor this and declare them dioxin free after removing bad batches. I have read that the US military was given guarantees that their supplies were not contaminated. I have also read that with the quantities that they ordered and that the speed that it was manufactured there was not the sampling and monitoring in place that might have been prudent. I don't know. If you really care there is lots and lots of biased (both ways) literature on the subject to read.
The good old wikipedia seems to have something on it though I haven't read it: URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange
Disclaimer: As an ex-farm boy I contacted these specific chemicals many times and indeed on occasion was sprayed directly with them. I had no protective clothing or breathing apparatus. I have two healthy kids with fully formed pentadactyl limbs. My mental state however has now degraded to responding to stuff on slashdot occasionally............
Only 3 of the links are clickable - please try them all.
Note: The guy offers himself as a professional web designer. You too, for just a little money, can have a great looking inter-active website.
Slashdot Mirror
You missed out an important step.
SCO isn't SCO. Santa Cruz did the deal with Novell. Santa Cruz sold the Unix "business" to Caldera. When Santa Cruz changed their name to Tarantella, Caldera jumped in and changed its name to SCO (not Santa Cruz Operation, just SCO). Novell never signed anything over to SCO. SCO just pretends to be Santa Cruz when it benefits them.
Wow, Way to use 'contumeliously" in a sentence!
I'm sure that I cannot be alone in being sceptical of the claims made by the loudest communicators on both (I concede there may be more than two) sides of the debate.
"Does the spirit of scientific scepticism really require that I remain forever open-minded to denialist humbug until it's shown to be wrong?
My answer to this has to be:
"I am equally sceptical of denialist and non-denialist humbug until it's shown to be not wrong".
Honestly, for the life of me, I cannot think of a better definition of scientist than "sceptic". Recording observations and organising them in a logical sequence in order to disprove a theoretical construct used to be known as science when I was a lad. At the end of your writings, you listed chapters of all your inaccuracies and published with the humblest appeal: "I have failed to disprove this notion. Please review my data and model and assist me to disprove it. I am sceptical of the conclusions."
I admit openly that I am sceptical of everything I have read on climate. Should I report somewhere for a lynching?
Does simply ignoring the computer count as a manual override?
In November 1983, a Colombian jumbo jet enroute from Paris to Bogotà was making a scheduled stop in Madrid. Landing in the dark, the crew made a mistake with the instrument landing system, turned on to an incorrect track and flew into a hill. An analysis of the cockpit voice recorder revealed that some minutes before the crash, an audible ground proximity warning system had told the crew, "Pull up! Pull up!"
The pilot replied "Shut up, gringo."
Those were his last words. All 20 crew and 161 of the 172 passengers were killed.
The sprockets that drive the odometer and speedometer are typically nylon. They don't bear much load and are well lubricated. They can wear or fail in a number of different circumstances. I had one replaced with one that had a different tooth count. Gave me great fuel economy as I was driving around at about 10mph less than I thought I was.
No, because the words are pronounced the same, thanks to the fact that in English, the vowels in unstressed syllables are reduced to schwas.
happy fathes day
" What sort of opportunities are there for American citizens to work abroad?"
Lots of opportunities with this outfit:
[URL]http://www.marines.com/page/usmc.jsp[/URL]
"Any hassles I should know about?"
Nothing we can't train you for son.
On a more serious note, if you are under 29 there is a class of working VISA available in many countries that allows you to work there for up to 12 months with few restrictions.
If they want to upset people using unlicensed installs, I wonder.....
Wouldn't it be more effective to just force a desktop featuring Ballmer glaring out at you while simultaneously reaching for a chair?
Seriously a "jet-pack" enables you to do many things that can't be done as well by auto gyro.
I can see a use for these in search and inspection roles. It currently claims to have 30 mins endurance. If so, I can imagine them being very useful for a low search in rough terrain, under a forest canopy, over gorges, rivers, and generally hard going. If you need to put down and check something more closely, you can do it instantly and then resume the search just as fast. No need to call in a ground team.
Missing person from ski lodge? Strap on the pack and go take a quick look. Snow is the kind of obstacle that can be better traversed from 200 feet up. Cheaper to keep one of these things on standby than a helicopter.
Its qualities make it ideal for pipeline inspection. Low and slow where needed, across all sorts of terrain. Power line inspection is also a possibility. Boundary riding? Mineral exploration?
I am sure it would be far more useful with a semi-autonomous flight controller, fly by wire in effect. More stable, able to set for hover, automatic deployment of safety chute at system failure etc. These things could push the price up 5 times and it would still be a cheap alternative in many applications.
This and whatever may spawn from it have a great future from what I can see.
That is precisely what this (ADS-B) does. At the moment, when not in radar coverage, the pilot uses the radio to report his position which he reads from his GPS (or other instruments). ATC copy this down and track his movement from these position updates. Now the problem with this is that by the time he reads out the position and ATC copies it down, the aircraft has actually traveled several miles.
This is the start of the problem. You don't actually have a pinpoint position to work with. You actually have a circle of probability which is combination of equipment and reporting errors. You could fit a lot of planes on a 100 mile route if you only had to keep them a mile apart and you had constant, pinpoint instant updating position information.
After getting the position report, ATC now have an expanding bubble of possible positions the aircraft could actually occupy until they get the next voice update which might be 30 minutes hence. This could end up expanding to 30 miles wide and 120 miles long before it is updated again. (Updating resets the probability circle back to just a couple of miles again). To keep aircraft from colliding you have to separate the the great big probability of position areas, not just a couple of points. Two aircraft could occupy 200 miles of airspace and it is now full; room for no more.
ADS removes the pilot and the ATC from the position reporting chain. The aircraft equipment just codes and sends the position directly to the ATC equipment. The position then automagically just appears on the controller's screen (with a display note saying that it is ADS derived). In busy airspace these reports can be generated only seconds apart pulling that circular error of probability back in to only a couple of miles with each update. You can now fit 50 planes into the airspace where you might have put only a couple before.
RADAR does exactly the same thing as ADS. The ground equipment asks the plane where it is and it sends back a reflection (primary) or a coded pulse (secondary) which is then displayed on a controllers screen. The difference with ADS is that instead of an enormously expensive piece of ground equipment to decode and receive the signal it can all be done on a regular vhf/uhf radio. If you add another radio antenna to a cell tower nobody cares. You can also utilise the existing ground network to carry the signal back to the ATC centre. You don't have to pay techs to install and maintain your own proprietary equipment.
Try building a couple of hundred multi-million dollar radar dishes across the landscape and every kook, luny, luddite and portable Faraday cage wearing weirdo will be out to stop you and protect the speckled barn toad as a bonus.
The huge advantages of ADS are that it is accurate, cheap and has a small ground footprint. It can be adapted for long range (hf) and satellite updating for oceanic sectors. It's all win. If someone asks "what will do when it breaks?" Well look out he window, we're doing it now.
OMG I can't decide which post is the worst in this littany of ignorance, but this one ....
If you bothered to read the article you linked to you would note that MODE S is just an add on and only works in radar coverage. ADS is being rolled still where it is of the greatest benefit - beyond radar coverage.
The same company that is providing the MODE S gear has a reall big contract - providing the continuing roll out of ADS-B ground stations:
"Thales has previously supplied TAAATS and is currently delivering a nationwide network of ADS-B ground stations for Upper Airspace surveillance across areas of continental Australia outside the range of conventional radars."
As for the astounding number of people that can't get it through intuition:
Most of the world is not under radar coverage. A small small fraction of it is. What happens should the radar fail? Um, traffic is separated by the same means that is used where there is no radar coverage. What happens when GPS fails (it is already used for separating aircraft)? Strangely, traffic is separated by the same means that was used before there was GPS. Amazing.
Let me fix that for you:
The altitude calculated by the GPS is way more imprecise than the value measured by the altimeter.
No you're not missing anything. The altimeter provides the altitude readout and it's just sent as a "sentence" along with the other information. Altitude data is already encoded from the altimeter and sent to the ground based radar as part of a coded signal from a transponder in the aircraft. This has been the way for decades. There is no need to get altitude from GPS. Position data from GPS is another thing. It is theoretically more accurate than a radar position, but there a bunch of innaccuracies that have to be built into a 'tolerance" that has to be applied to the aircraft position as reported.
TCAS is a traffic collision avoidance device also in use today that transmits altitude data between aircraft. Again the data comes from the altimeter.
Automatic Dependant Surveillance (ADS) data provides position (from INS or GPS) and altitude from the altimeter. The data can be sent via radio link or satellite. The amount of times per minute (or hour) that this data is updated to the ground station provides the basis for seperation of aircraft. If you update quite often you can run planes just a few miles apart. If you update every thirty minutes or so by expensive satellite links (trans-ocean) you might have to run the aircraft 100 miles apart. Some of the cost is in the aircraft but much of the cost is in ground station receivers, computers to interpret the data, displays to show the aircraft positions and then training for everybody along the line to use it.
The benefit is in better routing and less time in the "stack" when you arrive. Less fuel burnt is a cost saving but also think in total cost per minute of crewing and running a 747. It costs a bundle to switch to this but the longer term savings are far greater.
http://http//www.fas.org/nuke/guide/china/index.h
China does not need your "permission" to have nuclear weapons.
They seem to have managed to avoid using them over the past 50 years somehow despite your dire warning. Still, only one country has launched nuclear strikes against another. Hint: It wasn't China.
Most reassuring, especially for the rogue undercover militia governments of Panama, Nicaragua, Grenada and Iraq.
I'm sure it's possible to be patriotic without being culturally blind or xenophobic.
Dunno where this stuff starts. I watched Clockwork Orange in a cinema in Townsville not long after it was released. There was a censorship board for a short while in the Joh years (which ended 2 decades ago) but it was put in place as a purely political stunt and never did anything noteworthy that I can remember. Joh made himself famous in 1969 for banning "Hair" which wasn't planned to be on stage in Queensland anyway. I think Oh Calcutta did go on and it had several nude scenes. He excelled himself by insisting some PNG dancers cover their breasts during their dance at a cultural exposition. Probably didn't like those National Geographic boobs any more than the rest of us!
Most of the stuff you've heard about Queensland and censorship is however purely urban myth.
PS There were a few "funny" cops that tried prosecuting a few shows as "indecent". Rodney Rude was prosecuted for saying cock on stage. His response was to stand there and just keep saying it over and over and over. His Qld audiences couldn't get enough of it.
Lots of sites about that give some history on it. Here's one off the top of Google search:
http://www.dieselsite.com/index.asp?PageAction=VI
and a lift of what it has to say: A brief history:
Water injection was evaluated scientifically in the 1930's by H. Ricardo who demonstrated that one can basically double the power output of an engine using water/methanol. The first widespread use was during WWII on supercharged and turbocharged aircraft. In 1942, the German Luftwaffe increased the horsepower of the Focke-Wulf 190D-9 fighter aircraft from 1776HP to 2240HP using 50/50% water/methanol injection. The allies soon followed by fitting the P51 Mustang and other high performance aircraft with water/methanol injection. Following the war, the turboprop aircraft industry used water/methanol injection and called it the "automatic power reserve system (APR)" for use in hot or high altitude take off. It surfaced again in the 60's when GM used a system on the OEM turbo Corvair. It was used effectively in Formula 1 before being banned for adding too much power. Bombadier's E-tech outboard engines (no link - horror flash site) use computer timed injection to control charge and lubrication to get greater efficiency and cleanliness from 2-stroke engines.
Again I am not sure which measures of efficiency are being spoken of here, but even a couple of percent reduction of fuel burnt would mean astronomical savings in money, easing of political pressure and of course conserving the resource itself.
Cue the AC Microsoft Astroturf Champions:-
$ M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$
They have a solid policy of responding to any use of "M$" with a tantrum any 2 year old would be proud of. Poor little weenies. Of course they could be getting paid for it so I for one am willing to help them earn a few coppers, here you go:
M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M$M
If I can build on this a bit, how about patent applications be absolutely and simply defined?
:)
Well even a little more than they are now perhaps:
1. Only a physical object actually demonstrated in a full working condition, accompanied by documentation completely describing its operation and construction, can be protected by patent.
2. An accompanying statement must describe the innovative nature of the object.
3. A public benefit statement quantify the advantage to the people of granting an exclusive monopoly to the inventor.
4. If the invention uses software, all source code and all application programming interfaces are required to be published as part of the documentation.
Patents cannot be granted for longer than seven years and cannot be extended by any means.
On software:
Software has the protection of copyright and trade secret, it cannot be patented.
Software that has been granted the protection by a current patent may continue for another 3.5 years, provided that full source code and APIs are published (not protected until published) and that such source code becomes public domain at the end of the period.
The optimist in me believes it should take months before the lawyers corrupt this approach.
I don't know, but wouldn't rocket thrust be calculated in Poundals (an old demon from high school physics that eluded me even back then)? I would imagine trying to explain the units and the calculations to an investigating committee could be fun.
Here's a quick link to Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundal
If there was ever an argument for conversion to metric surely it has to be calculating force with poundals. Hail Newton.
The post above wasn't there when I started to hack out this reply doh :)and the direct to description link doesn't seem to work with the final / in place. Trying again:
http://www.evinrude.com/en-CA/E-Tec/E-TEC.Advantag e/Cleaner.Quieter.htm
Looks ok in preview.
Why do you think there isn't? http://www.evinrude.com/en-CA/E-Tec/E-TEC.Advantag e/Cleaner.Quieter.htm/
Legalised drunk driving may be path back to majority for Democrats. It seems to have traction at the grass roots level:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQUWqMuhLyI/
Agent Orange (Blue White Pink Green Purple and whatever) were not weapons. They were herbicides. They were not dropped. They were sprayed by transport aircraft converted into giant cropdusters.
The "defoliants" were used to remove the jungle cover in a few areas in Viet-Nam where VC/NVA activity was prolific and hidden under the forest canopy. It is arguable that it achieved its purpose. It was "policy" not to spray it directly onto population. The lingering after affect is less about poisons than about the totally denuded terrain left behind, that saw topsoil torn away and lost in the following monsoons. Wet deserts. I don't know if the areas have recovered yet - maybe?
Agent Orange was simply a mix of 2.4.5-T and 2.4-D which are common farm chemicals used to this today as weedicides. (Haven't seen 2.4.5-T around lately, it may have been pulled). They really work well to kill off broadleaf plants (vines) amongst grass crops like sorghum and maize. They are systemic and apparently in effect starve the plants. As far as the literature that I have read relates, these chemicals do not have any such effect on animals and more to the point - humans. They would almost certainly be friendlier than spraying with diesel fuel and kerosene which was also tried. The great poison debate that arose over Agent Orange came from a contaminant - dioxin.
Apparently dioxin can be produced as an impurity in the manufacturing process. The chemical companies supposedly monitor this and declare them dioxin free after removing bad batches. I have read that the US military was given guarantees that their supplies were not contaminated. I have also read that with the quantities that they ordered and that the speed that it was manufactured there was not the sampling and monitoring in place that might have been prudent. I don't know. If you really care there is lots and lots of biased (both ways) literature on the subject to read.
The good old wikipedia seems to have something on it though I haven't read it:
URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange
Disclaimer: As an ex-farm boy I contacted these specific chemicals many times and indeed on occasion was sprayed directly with them. I had no protective clothing or breathing apparatus. I have two healthy kids with fully formed pentadactyl limbs. My mental state however has now degraded to responding to stuff on slashdot occasionally............
Since you mention Oz hardware sites I would like to nominate this one:
http://www.webmarkets.com.au//
Only 3 of the links are clickable - please try them all.
Note: The guy offers himself as a professional web designer. You too, for just a little money, can have a great looking inter-active website.