One of the better things to come out of this is that folks who already have pilot's licenses can fly this class of plane with just a driver's license. The FAA has a long set of procedures you have to go through to get a medical certificate if you are in anything but great health - chronic conditions like diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, migraines - all these can completely disqualify you from flying unless you get a doctor to help track you for a period of time, fill out a lot of paperwork, and send it in for months of processing by the FAA - and there's no guarantee they'll issue a medical certificate after all that. With this rule, pilots with lapsed medicals can "self-certify" that they're good to fly (blood sugar ok, migraine not happening today) and go buzzing around in a small aircraft that won't dent much should it turn out they goofed.
It's no replacement for a full PP-ASEL, but it's a good start, and probably more generally useful than the almost-never-gotten Recreational Pilot's license.
Don't just do the computation at the top - do it for the whole trajectory.
I believe you get to an altitude where combustion isn't self-supporting, but I'm not sure if that's before or after you pass through the ozone layer (slightly caustic in its own right). Once you're at altitude... you just have to worry about atomic oxygen eating away at your ever-so-thin envelope and letting all your gas out, although if you got enough O1 together in one spot it would be happy to get together with some hydrogen, and would probably provide its own spark (and now I've gotta go look stuff up...)
Yes. Atomic oxygen (O1), standard diatomic oxygen (O2, the kind we breathe), and ozone (O3, the kind the blocks UV and gets eaten by fluorocarbons). O1 and O3 are very reactive, but nothing that a hydrogen balloon should have to worry about, so long as it contains most of its hydrogen.
Of course, one of the other great benefits of helium over hydrogen is that helium is MUCH more containable - He stays inside Mylar envelopes a lot longer than H, which has been known to burrow its way out of multi-layer metal/ceramic containers thanks to its small atomic size.
P. Tobin Maginnis, University of Mississippi... Hiya, Tobin!
Re:His comment on Slashdot:
on
More From Tanenbaum
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I never had him, but my favorite undergrad CS professor LOVED using his books - he would say "Here's where Tannenbaum got it right" and riff for five minutes, then say "And here's where he blew it, and this is why" and be off for fifteen... I enjoyed Tobin's classes, and I'm not sure he'd've been nearly as much fun without AST's textbooks to use as a basis. I've been through Compilers, Computer Networks, and two Operating Systems classes using Tannenbaum's books, (and many since using books by others), and I can say they were all bona-fide Learning Experiences.
Back then (way back in the late '80s), standard assignments were to go "tweak" parts of Minix - make the network interface big- or little-endian, switchable on the fly; change the file system block size and see what happens; screw up the priority system and see if user keypresses even get answered before your applications finish running... as a learning OS, demonstrating ways OSs can be put together, I learned a lot from it.
Then we got into compilers... *sigh*
Re:you won't have any choice, you'll pay it
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
Oil as a component or source of raw materials is very different from oil as an energy source - there are often synthetic replacements for the raw material components that come from oil.
As for your '82 Civic - they still let you drive those where you live? Most states with emissions standards won't allow that "old rust heap" to stay on the roads if it's not burning its gas efficiently.
The other posters in the thread are correct - this isn't a one-to-one trade - the floor of oil cost will rise, making other technologies more cost-effective; if demand for the oil stays up, then the prices will rise and stay above the cost floor, making more and more oil extraction technologies cost-effective. It's going to be interesting to see where the final balance points are - and if we can extract that oil from the Canadian tar sands at a cost below the eventual price.
The different regional droughts also "persuaded" a lot of dairy farmers to sell their herds for beef - they weren't able to grow enough hay or corn to feed their cattle with the yields reduced from the droughts, so they cut the size of their herds to what they could feed. I imagine production will rise in 9 months to a year - about the time the next generation of dairy cattle is ready to produce.
One of the arguments among the political types is whether the price of oil will rise as the cost to produce rises, thereby producing a relatively stable supply at some to-be-determined rate and volume - an asymptotic approach, whereby the price we will pay for oil will HAVE to go up as the cost to produce the oil increases. I'm sure this is discussed in this book somewhere, but it's useful to remember - you can only charge what someone is willing to pay. Petroleum may become a relatively scarce commodity, in which case we'll find out if we're willing to pay for it after all.
You will care when the fuel to generate the electricity has gone up so much that the utility raises their rates for the Underground, which will have to raise fares (while crying out for more state aid).
The most popular fuel for new generators is natural gas - a fossil fuel, oft found with coal and oil, and difficult (or risky) to transport unless pipelined. Also in short supply, with prices increasing almost 100% over the last year.
Public transportation is arguably more efficient use of resources, but when energy prices rise the way they have recently, noone is immune.
Actually, I read "Quicksilver" and asked myself, "Was there a point?" Then I got through "The Confusion" and asked, "Did I miss a point?" and answered myself "No, it's not there yet."
Now, if "System" doesn't have at least one, preferably two, possibly up to three points... I'm gonna be blunt....
Ha! Stephenson may not be very good at endings... but at least his books HAVE endings. Jordan's Wheel, on the other hand, seems destined to be the Energizer Bunny(tm) of book series... I might consider buying the rest when I hear that he's done, or dead, whereas I'm going to subject myself to "The System Of The World" because I know that when I'm through reading it, I'm through with these books.
This comment and the next are the two that are most accurate, from what I remember of working with and for IBM at the time.
IBM had a near-death experience.
They were down to the point where the stock price was close to liquidation value of existing stock, real estate, and their patents, and John Akers got fired (from a cannon) - and Gerstner came in, rocked-and-rolled over the entrenched folks, and made the company start reinventing itself. Sold off Federal Systems (IIRC, the only profit-making organization at the time) for quick cash, fired a lot of deadwood, and transformed the company into something that didn't just do software and systems to sell Big Iron - they built systems, and could sell all the pieces from in-house resources, or from your vendor of choice.
Amazing what a near-death experience can do for a company....
Brav-o. Good summary. One little thing - if Sun open-sources their own code, it's not duplicating the API - it's releasing it. Now, if there's IP in that code that's locked up somewhere, or licensed somehow, that's a problem - one that IBM should be able to help solve, given their library of IP rights.
If I were at Sun, one of my concerns would be which of their development projects to open, and when. "Java" isn't just Java 2 Standard Edition - the Enterprise Edition and Mobile/Wireless Edition have lives of their own; then there's (still) Jini and all their XML stuff. Sun is sinking cash into lots of different efforts, trying to establish Java in market niches (like mobile phones) and building in tool support, documentation, etc. Throwing the doors open and letting the world at their code base may not be the smartest thing at the moment (esp. if there's licensed IP in there somewhere that they need to go negotiate to open, or remove).
I'd like to see them phase in open-source. Give 'em six months or so for the 3 major "platforms", including all the java.* and javax.* packages, then another six months for the com.sun.* packages - with an expectation that other players would start working on them immediately. After that, every new thing they do should be opened no later than beta... and the JCP should allow participants to collaborate on implementations at the source-code level, so JCP members could work in semi-privacy until the code got fully opened at their beta release.
Modern authors need to re-read their Strunk & White.
I believe it was Twain who said that as a starting point, an author should take every occurrence of the word "very" and change it to "damn" - since the editors of the day would promptly remove it, thereby improving the overall quality of the writer's work.
Strict Strunk & White makes for fairly flavorless text - but a good story can still fight its way through.
Heinlein WAS fairly hard SF - he's now Gone. The same can be said for Dr. A. I like Robinson and Brin for the "hardness" of their SF while still telling good stories.
Remember when all the SF stories' computer names ended in "AC" - for "Analog Computer"? At the time, that was "hard" SF - it didn't age well.
A key element (to me, at least) of the above thread - there has to be an infrastructure in place to allow money to flow to developers, in return for features to flow to users. This is Non-Trivial - in fact, it's what most dot-bomb enterpreneurs called a Business Model, and we saw how many of those actually worked out, didn't we?
Hooking up users and producers is where business, finance, and marketing people live, and they're pretty good at it. Unfortunately, they want to be paid, too, so we're no longer talking about just paying programmers. Then there's the startup costs - it takes a while to get a critical mass of users, so unless you're working for an existing company, non-profit, university, or government, you have venture capital folks, and later shareholders, to answer to.
Who is making a profit off free software? Red Hat? Are they making it selling software, selling customization, or selling support?
It may be Free software, but until there's some kind of business model in place to allow Profit from its generation and support, then proprietary software will continue to exist, even if only in niche markets where there aren't enough interested hackers to build solutions for free.
I love Dr. A's work, but he produced so d@#n MUCH of it! The Robot stories alone qualify him for Grand Master status; the Foundation takes a much longer-term look at history and the forces that drive it than RAH really did, his short stories fill volumes... it's not uniformly Great, but it's almost always interesting. The problem is, it takes months or years to work your way through it all - on the other hand, it's not over so quickly. I could probably keep myself happy for a couple of weeks on the proverbial desert island with just the Robot and Foundation books and stories.
Then there are the hundreds of non-fiction works he authored, then edited (later). He's one of the ones I still miss, because I know if he were still alive, he'd still be writing, and I'd still be looking forward to his next work.
Private industry does a lot - but government usually does it first. The oceans were explored by governments (Henry the Navigator, Drake, Magellan) and oceanic technology was developed with public funds (the British, Dutch, and assorted other Navies) or publicly-guaranteed companies (British East India Co., various Dutch organizations, most other gov't-chartered corporations). Ship design, map-making, navigation technology - all developed and provided by the governments. Very few private, "commercial" operations around in those days, as we use the word.
And the skies - can anyone honestly say we'd have 777s today if not for WWII? Government funded research and production led to huge improvements in technology and reliability of that technology, as well as pushing new initiatives - like jet power.
Have we gotten to the point in space where we were with air after WWII? I don't think so - yet. Maybe Rutan will prove me wrong... I hope so.
That's how actual recalls actually happen, most of the time - company A realizes "Oops, shoulda carried that 4 and not rounded down the.49" and issues a recall for their Self-Fermenting Spangulator, which out in the Real World catches fire one time in 13,321, not one time in 31,103,927.4, and there are lawyers at the door.
Occasionally, a government or whistleblower organization gets into the fray, but usually it's the lawyers and actuaries who decide when and how to recall things. Wonder how that would change if liability awards got capped?
Why can't websites actually proofread the captions on their pictures? I realize most of the mistakes on that site would be fine with a spellchecker - but "exiting" does NOT mean the same as "existing".
Heh - might as well wish for proper grammar from the press.
Slashdot Mirror
The plane won't do stupid stuff, or smart stuff either - most of the planes in this category are lucky to have GPS.
The big difference - the size of the crater they make if the pilot does something very stupid.
One of the better things to come out of this is that folks who already have pilot's licenses can fly this class of plane with just a driver's license. The FAA has a long set of procedures you have to go through to get a medical certificate if you are in anything but great health - chronic conditions like diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, migraines - all these can completely disqualify you from flying unless you get a doctor to help track you for a period of time, fill out a lot of paperwork, and send it in for months of processing by the FAA - and there's no guarantee they'll issue a medical certificate after all that. With this rule, pilots with lapsed medicals can "self-certify" that they're good to fly (blood sugar ok, migraine not happening today) and go buzzing around in a small aircraft that won't dent much should it turn out they goofed.
It's no replacement for a full PP-ASEL, but it's a good start, and probably more generally useful than the almost-never-gotten Recreational Pilot's license.
Don't just do the computation at the top - do it for the whole trajectory.
I believe you get to an altitude where combustion isn't self-supporting, but I'm not sure if that's before or after you pass through the ozone layer (slightly caustic in its own right). Once you're at altitude... you just have to worry about atomic oxygen eating away at your ever-so-thin envelope and letting all your gas out, although if you got enough O1 together in one spot it would be happy to get together with some hydrogen, and would probably provide its own spark (and now I've gotta go look stuff up...)
Yes. Atomic oxygen (O1), standard diatomic oxygen (O2, the kind we breathe), and ozone (O3, the kind the blocks UV and gets eaten by fluorocarbons). O1 and O3 are very reactive, but nothing that a hydrogen balloon should have to worry about, so long as it contains most of its hydrogen.
Of course, one of the other great benefits of helium over hydrogen is that helium is MUCH more containable - He stays inside Mylar envelopes a lot longer than H, which has been known to burrow its way out of multi-layer metal/ceramic containers thanks to its small atomic size.
P. Tobin Maginnis, University of Mississippi... Hiya, Tobin!
I never had him, but my favorite undergrad CS professor LOVED using his books - he would say "Here's where Tannenbaum got it right" and riff for five minutes, then say "And here's where he blew it, and this is why" and be off for fifteen... I enjoyed Tobin's classes, and I'm not sure he'd've been nearly as much fun without AST's textbooks to use as a basis. I've been through Compilers, Computer Networks, and two Operating Systems classes using Tannenbaum's books, (and many since using books by others), and I can say they were all bona-fide Learning Experiences.
Back then (way back in the late '80s), standard assignments were to go "tweak" parts of Minix - make the network interface big- or little-endian, switchable on the fly; change the file system block size and see what happens; screw up the priority system and see if user keypresses even get answered before your applications finish running... as a learning OS, demonstrating ways OSs can be put together, I learned a lot from it.
Then we got into compilers... *sigh*
Oil as a component or source of raw materials is very different from oil as an energy source - there are often synthetic replacements for the raw material components that come from oil.
As for your '82 Civic - they still let you drive those where you live? Most states with emissions standards won't allow that "old rust heap" to stay on the roads if it's not burning its gas efficiently.
The other posters in the thread are correct - this isn't a one-to-one trade - the floor of oil cost will rise, making other technologies more cost-effective; if demand for the oil stays up, then the prices will rise and stay above the cost floor, making more and more oil extraction technologies cost-effective. It's going to be interesting to see where the final balance points are - and if we can extract that oil from the Canadian tar sands at a cost below the eventual price.
The different regional droughts also "persuaded" a lot of dairy farmers to sell their herds for beef - they weren't able to grow enough hay or corn to feed their cattle with the yields reduced from the droughts, so they cut the size of their herds to what they could feed. I imagine production will rise in 9 months to a year - about the time the next generation of dairy cattle is ready to produce.
One of the arguments among the political types is whether the price of oil will rise as the cost to produce rises, thereby producing a relatively stable supply at some to-be-determined rate and volume - an asymptotic approach, whereby the price we will pay for oil will HAVE to go up as the cost to produce the oil increases. I'm sure this is discussed in this book somewhere, but it's useful to remember - you can only charge what someone is willing to pay. Petroleum may become a relatively scarce commodity, in which case we'll find out if we're willing to pay for it after all.
You will care when the fuel to generate the electricity has gone up so much that the utility raises their rates for the Underground, which will have to raise fares (while crying out for more state aid).
The most popular fuel for new generators is natural gas - a fossil fuel, oft found with coal and oil, and difficult (or risky) to transport unless pipelined. Also in short supply, with prices increasing almost 100% over the last year.
Public transportation is arguably more efficient use of resources, but when energy prices rise the way they have recently, noone is immune.
Actually, I read "Quicksilver" and asked myself, "Was there a point?" Then I got through "The Confusion" and asked, "Did I miss a point?" and answered myself "No, it's not there yet."
Now, if "System" doesn't have at least one, preferably two, possibly up to three points... I'm gonna be blunt....
Ha! Stephenson may not be very good at endings... but at least his books HAVE endings. Jordan's Wheel, on the other hand, seems destined to be the Energizer Bunny(tm) of book series... I might consider buying the rest when I hear that he's done, or dead, whereas I'm going to subject myself to "The System Of The World" because I know that when I'm through reading it, I'm through with these books.
This comment and the next are the two that are most accurate, from what I remember of working with and for IBM at the time.
IBM had a near-death experience.
They were down to the point where the stock price was close to liquidation value of existing stock, real estate, and their patents, and John Akers got fired (from a cannon) - and Gerstner came in, rocked-and-rolled over the entrenched folks, and made the company start reinventing itself. Sold off Federal Systems (IIRC, the only profit-making organization at the time) for quick cash, fired a lot of deadwood, and transformed the company into something that didn't just do software and systems to sell Big Iron - they built systems, and could sell all the pieces from in-house resources, or from your vendor of choice.
Amazing what a near-death experience can do for a company....
Brav-o. Good summary. One little thing - if Sun open-sources their own code, it's not duplicating the API - it's releasing it. Now, if there's IP in that code that's locked up somewhere, or licensed somehow, that's a problem - one that IBM should be able to help solve, given their library of IP rights.
If I were at Sun, one of my concerns would be which of their development projects to open, and when. "Java" isn't just Java 2 Standard Edition - the Enterprise Edition and Mobile/Wireless Edition have lives of their own; then there's (still) Jini and all their XML stuff. Sun is sinking cash into lots of different efforts, trying to establish Java in market niches (like mobile phones) and building in tool support, documentation, etc. Throwing the doors open and letting the world at their code base may not be the smartest thing at the moment (esp. if there's licensed IP in there somewhere that they need to go negotiate to open, or remove).
I'd like to see them phase in open-source. Give 'em six months or so for the 3 major "platforms", including all the java.* and javax.* packages, then another six months for the com.sun.* packages - with an expectation that other players would start working on them immediately. After that, every new thing they do should be opened no later than beta... and the JCP should allow participants to collaborate on implementations at the source-code level, so JCP members could work in semi-privacy until the code got fully opened at their beta release.
But that's just an idea....
Yes, yes it is... and they keep showing the same movies....
This looks like a new competition at the next WorldCon....
Modern authors need to re-read their Strunk & White.
I believe it was Twain who said that as a starting point, an author should take every occurrence of the word "very" and change it to "damn" - since the editors of the day would promptly remove it, thereby improving the overall quality of the writer's work.
Strict Strunk & White makes for fairly flavorless text - but a good story can still fight its way through.
Heinlein WAS fairly hard SF - he's now Gone. The same can be said for Dr. A. I like Robinson and Brin for the "hardness" of their SF while still telling good stories.
Remember when all the SF stories' computer names ended in "AC" - for "Analog Computer"? At the time, that was "hard" SF - it didn't age well.
A key element (to me, at least) of the above thread - there has to be an infrastructure in place to allow money to flow to developers, in return for features to flow to users. This is Non-Trivial - in fact, it's what most dot-bomb enterpreneurs called a Business Model, and we saw how many of those actually worked out, didn't we?
Hooking up users and producers is where business, finance, and marketing people live, and they're pretty good at it. Unfortunately, they want to be paid, too, so we're no longer talking about just paying programmers. Then there's the startup costs - it takes a while to get a critical mass of users, so unless you're working for an existing company, non-profit, university, or government, you have venture capital folks, and later shareholders, to answer to.
Who is making a profit off free software? Red Hat? Are they making it selling software, selling customization, or selling support?
It may be Free software, but until there's some kind of business model in place to allow Profit from its generation and support, then proprietary software will continue to exist, even if only in niche markets where there aren't enough interested hackers to build solutions for free.
I love Dr. A's work, but he produced so d@#n MUCH of it! The Robot stories alone qualify him for Grand Master status; the Foundation takes a much longer-term look at history and the forces that drive it than RAH really did, his short stories fill volumes... it's not uniformly Great, but it's almost always interesting. The problem is, it takes months or years to work your way through it all - on the other hand, it's not over so quickly. I could probably keep myself happy for a couple of weeks on the proverbial desert island with just the Robot and Foundation books and stories.
Then there are the hundreds of non-fiction works he authored, then edited (later). He's one of the ones I still miss, because I know if he were still alive, he'd still be writing, and I'd still be looking forward to his next work.
and sales of over-prices exotic teas increased hugely thereafter....
Private industry does a lot - but government usually does it first. The oceans were explored by governments (Henry the Navigator, Drake, Magellan) and oceanic technology was developed with public funds (the British, Dutch, and assorted other Navies) or publicly-guaranteed companies (British East India Co., various Dutch organizations, most other gov't-chartered corporations). Ship design, map-making, navigation technology - all developed and provided by the governments. Very few private, "commercial" operations around in those days, as we use the word.
And the skies - can anyone honestly say we'd have 777s today if not for WWII? Government funded research and production led to huge improvements in technology and reliability of that technology, as well as pushing new initiatives - like jet power.
Have we gotten to the point in space where we were with air after WWII? I don't think so - yet. Maybe Rutan will prove me wrong... I hope so.
That's how actual recalls actually happen, most of the time - company A realizes "Oops, shoulda carried that 4 and not rounded down the .49" and issues a recall for their Self-Fermenting Spangulator, which out in the Real World catches fire one time in 13,321, not one time in 31,103,927.4, and there are lawyers at the door.
Occasionally, a government or whistleblower organization gets into the fray, but usually it's the lawyers and actuaries who decide when and how to recall things. Wonder how that would change if liability awards got capped?
*sigh*
Why can't websites actually proofread the captions on their pictures? I realize most of the mistakes on that site would be fine with a spellchecker - but "exiting" does NOT mean the same as "existing".
Heh - might as well wish for proper grammar from the press.
The article mentions that they think mouse use over 20 hours a week can contribute, but they're not sure how much, since they were studying keyboards.
Oy. Between work and gaming at home, I use a mouse 60+ hours a week. Time for an arm massage.