Good idea! They even make fancy ones that can bend to turn corners a bit and use the shape of the rollers to keep the product on them going the right direction and not falling off the conveyor.
A slight slope would be all that you'd need to keep the product moving without any further human assistance.
Depending, the ice truck should already have one available. Heck, worst case have a cart.
Indeed, I'm mostly a libertarian and I view this as not really any different than a neighborhood, town, or city getting together and forming a cooperative. My reaction is 'good on them! Fie on established businesses that are failing to meet demands'.
If the line moves 4 times faster, for 1/4 the time, then you need 4 times the laborers... for 1/4 the time. You don't get to multiply people the same way you can speed.
Power vs Energy.;)
He does actually point this out - his example was rather than needing 5 volunteers doing 1 hour shifts sequentially, they do it in parallel. Which raises the question of whether you HAVE 5 volunteers, or just 1 doing a 5 hour shift...
Still, one would have to ask how many bags a volunteer can carry - if he can carry 3 per trip, but ends up only carrying 1-2 much of the time, a caching system would be more efficient because he can just keep hauling 3 bags per trip rather than 1-2 if that's all the current customer is ordering.
A) still calling B) trying to update a half dozen media sites and C) now facebook is going to auto spam you complete with graphics and ad's
Okay, in my experience with the military every time there was a major disaster somewhere in the world I had to tell my command that I was safe and that I didn't have any immediate family in the affected area. They eventually mostly automated this with a website I could use.
So, at least theoretically facebook could dispense with the graphics and ads and send minimal amounts of data, even stuff like 'respond to this text with your status to auto-update', using a few kilobytes rather than megabytes. Done widely enough this would indeed help lower the strain on communication infrastructures during times of emergency while allowing more people to update their status.
I still have no idea what actual information this is supposed to convey. Or is it more of a "rah rah, evolution!" reaction thing?
You need something to compare it to; it's right in the article: "For comparison, humans and chimpanzees split somewhere between 5 and 7 million years ago"
So mice and rats diverged somewhere between 12 and 24 million years ago, while the range is 5 to 7M for humans and chimps. Humans and Chimps are very different and we'd certainly not try to treat chimpanzees as 'small humans' in a lab setting. Yet we tried to do so with mice, treating them as small rats.
Just a linear comparison would tell you that rats and mice have had 3 times as long to diverge as humans, making it a good chance that they're more different than humans and chimps are, even excluding that a generation of rats/mice can be measured in months when it's decades for humans and chimps.
As for the huge range - "He left the highway somewhere in Nebraska" is an overly broad area to search for an escaped felon, but if it's the best the investigators can come up with at the moment, it's the best they can come up with. 'Specification' is already a vague line, and without DNA to compare, or even enough intact skeletal remains, it can be tough.
The problem is that they still get money from normal people who don't realize their real agenda. It's a bit like smoking way back in the day - people didn't know it was harmful*, the tobacco companies were pushing untrue messages, etc...
PETA, the organization is a lot like that. They push a specific variation on their message to the world(be ethical about the treatment of animals!) that is non-offensive to the majority of people. As a result, pet owners will donate money to them, thinking that PETA is a bit like the old NRA(which put the money towards safety education, safe firing ranges, and such) - that their money would go towards animal shelters, education, fighting animal abuse, etc... They don't realize that their money is used to fund overpaid executives and push radical agendas.
As such, we need to scream it to the rafters until enough people know to give to their local animal shelter over PETA and PETA goes bankrupt.
*Well, many did, but it wasn't advertised, there were a lot of truly ignorant people.
That was pretty much my thought. A camel that's truly pissed off isn't going to be helping you. They're big ornery creatures, after all. Meanwhile in getting the camera view the camel was provided with fodder, water, medical care, as well as all the other help that a domestic camel gets in exchange for walking around.
Cost is about $15 billion. If there was real confidence it would work, the private sector would fund it.
What I think is telling is that at $15B you could have something like 5 GW sized fission plants. Even many research reactors have provisions to use utilize it's heat to produce electricity. Yet for all that money there are not only no provisions to produce electricity using ITER, but no provisions to even be able to install components to produce electricity.
37 meters. In some single-story houses, you will be able to make it. But let's not forget, that there is rarely a straight path for each drop back to the utility entrance.
You don't actually have to have all the drops go back to the entrance. I didn't mention it in this post(or I edited it out and don't remember doing it), but putting your switch in a central location can help drastically. Though I agree, 37 meters wouldn't be enough in many cases, the extra 18 meters I mentioned can make all the difference in the world for making that one run.
But note that I recommended both running the best wire available and conduit to boot. Futureproofing is a thing.
Read what the parent wrote- " the poor penetration of 5 GHz". Meaning it does not go through walls or other obstacles very well. Which is true. And a problem with deploying 5Ghz networks.
You know, I've read his post 3 times and all I get is "saturated wireless spectrum (both 2.4 and 5)"? even CTRL-F doesn't find 'poor penetration' within it. I think you meant the GP.
Personally, I haven't had any problems with 5Ghz, it's a lifesaver in areas like apartments/dorms where congestion is a bigger problem than range.
I've grown very tired of my apartment complex's saturated wireless spectrum (both 2.4 and 5) because everyone is right on top of each other and every apartment has one of three routers from the different ISP options.
Interesting. I didn't know that it was really possible to saturate the 5Ghz spectrum. 2.4 is easy with only having 3 non-overlapping channels, but 5Ghz has over twenty, and by default none of the channels overlap.
Last time I was in a dormitory I found over 20 networks within scanning range of the guy's room, but there was only ONE other network on the 5Ghz spectrum.
Citation? Per Wiki it says that cat6 can do 10Gb, just at a max of 55 meters. Cat6a can do 100M at that speed.
Given that my house is ~60x30 feet, you could darn near run the entire perimeter and still be under 55 meters.
Still, remember that typically speaking the largest cost for running wire is the labor; it's cheaper to run the 'good stuff' in the first place.
One odd thought - running conduit might not be a bad idea. Higher expense up front, but if you ever need to upgrade, such as to fiber, it'll be much easier.
Thing is, the quantity discount for a larger quantity of cat6 cable will probably make it cheaper to buy a roll of cat6 than a partial roll each of 6 and 5e. For anything but the most excessive of McMansions a single roll should more than service a home.
What you probably want is plenum/riser grade cable.
Also, I'd spend the money to put jacks & a patch panel in.
Depends on the task and area. Having watched some construction efforts over time, I don't see many people idle 'long term' in my local area. The latest had a guy standing around much of the time looking idle - but every 4 minutes or so he was busy for 30 seconds directing the latest truck where to dump it's fill dirt. You also had a couple flaggers working to ensure that the truck was able to get back on the road to head back for more dirt.
After that, well, you're going to have a safety monitor who's job is solely to look for and manage dangerous situations. It doesn't take many prevented injuries to pay for him. Construction manager/foreman, who's job is to coordinate with everybody else(mostly by jaw-jacking). Since it's often heavy work, regular breaks are needed.
Or maybe you work in an area where the unions have gone nuts...
Aren't there any towns hit hard enough to be willing to sell themselves out for this purpose such that building a fake town isn't necessary?
There's a number of abandoned military bases that are used on a routine basis. Both Mythbusters and Top Gear have used them.
The 'problem' is that such areas are normally laid out in logical ways. It specifically mentions that this fake town will have nasty traffic patterns and intersections.
Pick some of the worst designed intersections in the USA, they'll be in the town.
The iWatch will use sapphire glass, as many watches already do. This is bad for Apple and anyone else who uses GTAT though, because through no fault of their own they were forced into bankruptcy and may now find it hard to meet demand when iWatch production ramps up.
Bankruptcy comes in many different forms. For a corporation, chapter 7(liquidation) is pretty rare, most of the time it's chapter 11 - restructuring. The courts and creditors are smart enough to realize that a business selling things for a profit will get them more of their money back than one that isn't. So the health of the company is a concern. Heck, in some cases(see GM for an example), the company may end up reorganized with the creditors being the new owners. So again, a healthy business is better than a paralyzed failing one.
You get ~1k investors each putting $500k in; the trick being that they invest $500k into something every month and operate on a 5 year time scale, so they actually have something like $30M in investments. Every so often they get the equivalent of facebook, ebay, or amazon to make up the occasional failure such as this.
Indeed, energy and electricity usage in the USA has been declining for some time. Penetration of CFLs has continued to increase, and now LED lights are reaching serious penetration levels(I have 3 in my house). Thinking back, while most screens(TVs, Monitors, and such) should be LCD at this point, they're still mostly CCFL lit. Today nearly all the ones you can buy are LED, and LEDs are 20-30% more efficient than the old backlights.
Due to gas prices and such, people are driving less on higher efficiency vehicles. Higher efficiency air conditioners and heat pumps, appliances in general, better insulated homes continue to creep in.
I interpreted Firethorn's first point to be that the shuttle was designed to retrieve and bring back to Earth a large object, but none of the objects it actually did return to Earth were that large. In that case, if the shuttle's payload bay had been smaller in the original design the orbiter itself would have been smaller and lighter and so would not have required quite so complicated a booster system (or a booster system at all.)
You are correct. The shuttle has brought things back, but never something that exceeded the original requirement before the USAF demanded it be capable of more.
Smaller load capacity would mean that you'd have to launch more satellites via dedicated boosters rather than shuttle flights, but given what shuttle launches ended up costing, it would have been cheaper. Indeed, it would allow more flexibility since you're not designing them to fit into the bay.
Increased cargo capacity means the shuttle has to be larger & heavier, and by inverse square laws it ended up being a LOT heavier and even structurally weaker.
They aren't copying the Shuttle. Just because you only know of one other reusable space vehicle, doesn't mean all other reusable vehicles share the same characteristics. If you see a dog spray painted pink, do you automatically assume all dogs are spray painted pink?
Just to be clear, their Dream Chaser looks a lot like the space shuttle. Though the internals can and probably are completely different.
Heck, even using space shuttle technology we would have had a far cheaper and more reliable craft if it wasn't for a number of compromises.
1. Ability to bring a largish satellite back(never used), resulted in the space shuttle being too big, necessitating the complex booster arrangement. 2. Larger size led to concerns about the availability of titanium, which far more of the shuttle would have been made of if it had been smaller. Due to it's higher melting/softening points, it would have saved at least one shuttle(probably).
switching to any higher-synthetic-content oil and installing a superior filter complex provides this kind of benefit.
Which is what the study mentioned. 3-4 weeks was using the old oil, 3-4 months is more likely with the high quality synthetic(with propitiatory additives) they switched to.
Looking up the specs of the 7.3L Power Stroke, it says 920 lbs dry, so 'wet' at 1100 makes sense. Making some sense of it, all I can think of is that he was rounding, so closer to 1600 pounds, not 2k, and that the 1100 doesn't include the cooling system(BIG radiator, hoses, coolant) that was also deleted.
Also, they did really improve it, didn't they? From 425lb-ft@2k to 525@1600, that's a LOT of improvement.
But if you go to an electric drivetrain, you eliminate that problem.
Among many. You also introduce some, but on the whole electric motors are vastly superior in all respects except one - the difficulty of keeping them supplied with electricity when you can't have them connected to the grid all the time.
I'm hesitantly interested in turbines for automotive applications, but Capstone has been trying to get something going for a long time now with no success. It makes me wonder why.
Conservativeness is the easiest explanation I have. These vehicles last a long time, and while buying one of these new-fangled systems could save you money, it could also lose you your shirt. See the consumer market in the USA and small diesel engines. Let them get used to the hybrid drive train, then maybe get them switched over to a turbine that has enough testing behind it in mobile applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Good idea! They even make fancy ones that can bend to turn corners a bit and use the shape of the rollers to keep the product on them going the right direction and not falling off the conveyor.
A slight slope would be all that you'd need to keep the product moving without any further human assistance.
Depending, the ice truck should already have one available. Heck, worst case have a cart.
Indeed, I'm mostly a libertarian and I view this as not really any different than a neighborhood, town, or city getting together and forming a cooperative. My reaction is 'good on them! Fie on established businesses that are failing to meet demands'.
If the line moves 4 times faster, for 1/4 the time, then you need 4 times the laborers... for 1/4 the time. You don't get to multiply people the same way you can speed.
Power vs Energy. ;)
He does actually point this out - his example was rather than needing 5 volunteers doing 1 hour shifts sequentially, they do it in parallel. Which raises the question of whether you HAVE 5 volunteers, or just 1 doing a 5 hour shift...
Still, one would have to ask how many bags a volunteer can carry - if he can carry 3 per trip, but ends up only carrying 1-2 much of the time, a caching system would be more efficient because he can just keep hauling 3 bags per trip rather than 1-2 if that's all the current customer is ordering.
I've never accused Walmart of efficiency, and McDonald's did it's motion efficiency studies decades and decades ago, and hasn't kept up the work.
A) still calling B) trying to update a half dozen media sites and C) now facebook is going to auto spam you complete with graphics and ad's
Okay, in my experience with the military every time there was a major disaster somewhere in the world I had to tell my command that I was safe and that I didn't have any immediate family in the affected area. They eventually mostly automated this with a website I could use.
So, at least theoretically facebook could dispense with the graphics and ads and send minimal amounts of data, even stuff like 'respond to this text with your status to auto-update', using a few kilobytes rather than megabytes. Done widely enough this would indeed help lower the strain on communication infrastructures during times of emergency while allowing more people to update their status.
I still have no idea what actual information this is supposed to convey. Or is it more of a "rah rah, evolution!" reaction thing?
You need something to compare it to; it's right in the article: "For comparison, humans and chimpanzees split somewhere between 5 and 7 million years ago"
So mice and rats diverged somewhere between 12 and 24 million years ago, while the range is 5 to 7M for humans and chimps. Humans and Chimps are very different and we'd certainly not try to treat chimpanzees as 'small humans' in a lab setting. Yet we tried to do so with mice, treating them as small rats.
Just a linear comparison would tell you that rats and mice have had 3 times as long to diverge as humans, making it a good chance that they're more different than humans and chimps are, even excluding that a generation of rats/mice can be measured in months when it's decades for humans and chimps.
As for the huge range - "He left the highway somewhere in Nebraska" is an overly broad area to search for an escaped felon, but if it's the best the investigators can come up with at the moment, it's the best they can come up with. 'Specification' is already a vague line, and without DNA to compare, or even enough intact skeletal remains, it can be tough.
The problem is that they still get money from normal people who don't realize their real agenda. It's a bit like smoking way back in the day - people didn't know it was harmful*, the tobacco companies were pushing untrue messages, etc...
PETA, the organization is a lot like that. They push a specific variation on their message to the world(be ethical about the treatment of animals!) that is non-offensive to the majority of people. As a result, pet owners will donate money to them, thinking that PETA is a bit like the old NRA(which put the money towards safety education, safe firing ranges, and such) - that their money would go towards animal shelters, education, fighting animal abuse, etc... They don't realize that their money is used to fund overpaid executives and push radical agendas.
As such, we need to scream it to the rafters until enough people know to give to their local animal shelter over PETA and PETA goes bankrupt.
*Well, many did, but it wasn't advertised, there were a lot of truly ignorant people.
That was pretty much my thought. A camel that's truly pissed off isn't going to be helping you. They're big ornery creatures, after all. Meanwhile in getting the camera view the camel was provided with fodder, water, medical care, as well as all the other help that a domestic camel gets in exchange for walking around.
Cost is about $15 billion. If there was real confidence it would work, the private sector would fund it.
What I think is telling is that at $15B you could have something like 5 GW sized fission plants. Even many research reactors have provisions to use utilize it's heat to produce electricity. Yet for all that money there are not only no provisions to produce electricity using ITER, but no provisions to even be able to install components to produce electricity.
37 meters. In some single-story houses, you will be able to make it. But let's not forget, that there is rarely a straight path for each drop back to the utility entrance.
You don't actually have to have all the drops go back to the entrance. I didn't mention it in this post(or I edited it out and don't remember doing it), but putting your switch in a central location can help drastically. Though I agree, 37 meters wouldn't be enough in many cases, the extra 18 meters I mentioned can make all the difference in the world for making that one run.
But note that I recommended both running the best wire available and conduit to boot. Futureproofing is a thing.
Read what the parent wrote- " the poor penetration of 5 GHz". Meaning it does not go through walls or other obstacles very well. Which is true. And a problem with deploying 5Ghz networks.
You know, I've read his post 3 times and all I get is "saturated wireless spectrum (both 2.4 and 5)"? even CTRL-F doesn't find 'poor penetration' within it. I think you meant the GP.
Personally, I haven't had any problems with 5Ghz, it's a lifesaver in areas like apartments/dorms where congestion is a bigger problem than range.
I've grown very tired of my apartment complex's saturated wireless spectrum (both 2.4 and 5) because everyone is right on top of each other and every apartment has one of three routers from the different ISP options.
Interesting. I didn't know that it was really possible to saturate the 5Ghz spectrum. 2.4 is easy with only having 3 non-overlapping channels, but 5Ghz has over twenty, and by default none of the channels overlap.
Last time I was in a dormitory I found over 20 networks within scanning range of the guy's room, but there was only ONE other network on the 5Ghz spectrum.
"Very Short" in this case is still 55 meters, which will more than cover 'most' houses, especially if you put the patch panel in a central location.
Cat6 can't go over 1000-megabits
Citation? Per Wiki it says that cat6 can do 10Gb, just at a max of 55 meters. Cat6a can do 100M at that speed.
Given that my house is ~60x30 feet, you could darn near run the entire perimeter and still be under 55 meters.
Still, remember that typically speaking the largest cost for running wire is the labor; it's cheaper to run the 'good stuff' in the first place.
One odd thought - running conduit might not be a bad idea. Higher expense up front, but if you ever need to upgrade, such as to fiber, it'll be much easier.
Thing is, the quantity discount for a larger quantity of cat6 cable will probably make it cheaper to buy a roll of cat6 than a partial roll each of 6 and 5e. For anything but the most excessive of McMansions a single roll should more than service a home.
What you probably want is plenum/riser grade cable.
Also, I'd spend the money to put jacks & a patch panel in.
Depends on the task and area. Having watched some construction efforts over time, I don't see many people idle 'long term' in my local area. The latest had a guy standing around much of the time looking idle - but every 4 minutes or so he was busy for 30 seconds directing the latest truck where to dump it's fill dirt. You also had a couple flaggers working to ensure that the truck was able to get back on the road to head back for more dirt.
After that, well, you're going to have a safety monitor who's job is solely to look for and manage dangerous situations. It doesn't take many prevented injuries to pay for him. Construction manager/foreman, who's job is to coordinate with everybody else(mostly by jaw-jacking). Since it's often heavy work, regular breaks are needed.
Or maybe you work in an area where the unions have gone nuts...
Aren't there any towns hit hard enough to be willing to sell themselves out for this purpose such that building a fake town isn't necessary?
There's a number of abandoned military bases that are used on a routine basis. Both Mythbusters and Top Gear have used them.
The 'problem' is that such areas are normally laid out in logical ways. It specifically mentions that this fake town will have nasty traffic patterns and intersections.
Pick some of the worst designed intersections in the USA, they'll be in the town.
why do I never see an ad for tea.
The tea companies aren't paying google/etc al... for ads, but the bathroom scale people are?
The iWatch will use sapphire glass, as many watches already do. This is bad for Apple and anyone else who uses GTAT though, because through no fault of their own they were forced into bankruptcy and may now find it hard to meet demand when iWatch production ramps up.
Bankruptcy comes in many different forms. For a corporation, chapter 7(liquidation) is pretty rare, most of the time it's chapter 11 - restructuring. The courts and creditors are smart enough to realize that a business selling things for a profit will get them more of their money back than one that isn't. So the health of the company is a concern. Heck, in some cases(see GM for an example), the company may end up reorganized with the creditors being the new owners. So again, a healthy business is better than a paralyzed failing one.
You get ~1k investors each putting $500k in; the trick being that they invest $500k into something every month and operate on a 5 year time scale, so they actually have something like $30M in investments. Every so often they get the equivalent of facebook, ebay, or amazon to make up the occasional failure such as this.
Indeed, energy and electricity usage in the USA has been declining for some time. Penetration of CFLs has continued to increase, and now LED lights are reaching serious penetration levels(I have 3 in my house). Thinking back, while most screens(TVs, Monitors, and such) should be LCD at this point, they're still mostly CCFL lit. Today nearly all the ones you can buy are LED, and LEDs are 20-30% more efficient than the old backlights.
Due to gas prices and such, people are driving less on higher efficiency vehicles. Higher efficiency air conditioners and heat pumps, appliances in general, better insulated homes continue to creep in.
I interpreted Firethorn's first point to be that the shuttle was designed to retrieve and bring back to Earth a large object, but none of the objects it actually did return to Earth were that large. In that case, if the shuttle's payload bay had been smaller in the original design the orbiter itself would have been smaller and lighter and so would not have required quite so complicated a booster system (or a booster system at all.)
You are correct. The shuttle has brought things back, but never something that exceeded the original requirement before the USAF demanded it be capable of more.
Smaller load capacity would mean that you'd have to launch more satellites via dedicated boosters rather than shuttle flights, but given what shuttle launches ended up costing, it would have been cheaper. Indeed, it would allow more flexibility since you're not designing them to fit into the bay.
Increased cargo capacity means the shuttle has to be larger & heavier, and by inverse square laws it ended up being a LOT heavier and even structurally weaker.
And they wouldn't have told us if they had brought one back...
I'd imagine that the Soviets/Russians would have spoken up by now if we'd stolen one of their satellites.
They aren't copying the Shuttle. Just because you only know of one other reusable space vehicle, doesn't mean all other reusable vehicles share the same characteristics. If you see a dog spray painted pink, do you automatically assume all dogs are spray painted pink?
Just to be clear, their Dream Chaser looks a lot like the space shuttle. Though the internals can and probably are completely different.
Heck, even using space shuttle technology we would have had a far cheaper and more reliable craft if it wasn't for a number of compromises.
1. Ability to bring a largish satellite back(never used), resulted in the space shuttle being too big, necessitating the complex booster arrangement.
2. Larger size led to concerns about the availability of titanium, which far more of the shuttle would have been made of if it had been smaller. Due to it's higher melting/softening points, it would have saved at least one shuttle(probably).
switching to any higher-synthetic-content oil and installing a superior filter complex provides this kind of benefit.
Which is what the study mentioned. 3-4 weeks was using the old oil, 3-4 months is more likely with the high quality synthetic(with propitiatory additives) they switched to.
Looking up the specs of the 7.3L Power Stroke, it says 920 lbs dry, so 'wet' at 1100 makes sense. Making some sense of it, all I can think of is that he was rounding, so closer to 1600 pounds, not 2k, and that the 1100 doesn't include the cooling system(BIG radiator, hoses, coolant) that was also deleted.
Also, they did really improve it, didn't they? From 425lb-ft@2k to 525@1600, that's a LOT of improvement.
But if you go to an electric drivetrain, you eliminate that problem.
Among many. You also introduce some, but on the whole electric motors are vastly superior in all respects except one - the difficulty of keeping them supplied with electricity when you can't have them connected to the grid all the time.
I'm hesitantly interested in turbines for automotive applications, but Capstone has been trying to get something going for a long time now with no success. It makes me wonder why.
Conservativeness is the easiest explanation I have. These vehicles last a long time, and while buying one of these new-fangled systems could save you money, it could also lose you your shirt. See the consumer market in the USA and small diesel engines. Let them get used to the hybrid drive train, then maybe get them switched over to a turbine that has enough testing behind it in mobile applications.