It may take congressional authorization to declare war, but as Commander in Chief the President of the U.S. is fully capable of ordering his troops to commit acts of war. Our recent air attacks on Libya are an excellent example; using Air Force and Navy assets to engage the military of a sovereign nation is a clear act of aggression, and would certainly constitute casus belli for them to declare war on us.
As far as I know there is no set procedure for how to handle violations of either Article 1 Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution or the War Powers Resolution. The clearest recourse Congress has for checking presidential power is to bring the President up on articles of impeachment, throwing him out of office. That's a pretty big club, and one that you don't swing lightly.
So what really happens? U.S. presidents do as they see fit, and give Congress a "waddaya gunna dewabboutit?" glare when it gets feisty.
2) In a dim room, your pupils dilate more if the scene before you is mostly dark, and dilated pupils generally produce poorer acuity. A bright background causes your pupils to contract, and just like stopping down a cheap camera lens, it improves the focus of the image hitting your retina.
That's not true for everyone. I checked wikipedia's entry on photographic F-stop, and it suggested that the acuity issue you're experiencing is due to lens defects, as they dominate distortion at large aperture. (note to self: I should have guessed that from point 1 about cataracts...) For people with good lenses, though, bright light reduces acuity as diffraction dominates the distortion at small apertures.
I'm sorry for your eye condition, and you're welcome to continue using a bright screen if that helps you. Please understand, though, that this isn't a one-size-fits-all situation, and don't hate me for using a dark screen if that's better for me.
For most people you have a point. My equation, however, is different:
Locked into AT&T for reasons other than the contract (for me, it's work) + No discount for using unsubsidized phone + No upfront cost for phone = Free phone.
When I started my contract with AT&T they were subsidizing the cost of my phone, but the contract on that phone is up. I haven't switched off because my phone works fine, and has features that I need (works internationally is a big one). If I were to upgrade to this phone it would be effectively free to me, as the price I pay on my cell bill won't change at all. That's not "on the credit card = free" it's "AT&T takes it out of my pocket whether they pay it to Nokia or not".
You sound like someone complaining that the free breakfast buffet at the hotel isn't really free because it's being subsidized by my room's nightly rate. Is going hungry in the morning somehow going to stick it to the man? It won't affect the rental rate of the room whether you eat breakfast or not, the charge is there anyhow. Feel free to stay at a hotel where they charge less per night and make you pay for breakfast if it makes you feel better. Just make sure you come back to let us know where you found it; these days they're all serving free breakfast in the mornings. By which I mean subsidizing the handset costs.
I also remember a project where pictures of criminals were merged together to find what an "average" criminal would look like. The result was surprisingly attractive, and similar to the result from averaging photographs of vegetarians. Neither average was useful for identifying the population it was drawn from. Lesson learned? The "normal" for attractiveness is the average for the population, and a good baseline for attractiveness can be found by averaging multiple pictures of ugly people.
The take-away for you is that you can save your money on supermodel photo shoots, just use mugshots instead. Of course, if you get enough funding totally go for the supermodels. The result will be the same, but the process will be much more enjoyable for you.
Yes. Also, thank you for making me aware of this not-yet-product. Wow. I can't tell you how much I want one. Two - one for work one for home.
I think that any true 3D display like the GP proposed would need a light field camera to capture the image. Playback would likely be challenging, and i suspect glasses would still be needed for stereo separation; on the other hand, with proper focusing cues and parallax issues resolved the stereo portion might be unnecessary. No stereo = no glasses + full brightness/contrast + accessibility to the monocular population; true light field display = full focal range available + (possibly) paralax. If the technical hurdles inherent in such a display could be overcome, it would truly be the next big thing in displays; I'd pay extra to see a movie in that format, where I won't for the stereo-only 3D.
I think it's rather more like the girl leaving her diary in what she thought was her living room because she doesn't care if her room-mates read it, but didn't realize there was an invisible (to her) portal marketed by a creepy company to creepy creepers for their creeping pleasure. ..
I think you've put your finger on the fundamental disconnect here. Our naive diary author likely switched it to public because, after all, how else will her college friends find her? Once she made it public though, the creepy company started selling her data because, after all, it's public: "What do you mean that isn't what you intended to happen? Why else would you make your diary and location public if you didn't want people to find you? Aren't we simply helping you make it happen?? Why are you complaining???"
Asking for [clarity], though, is like the salmon asking the bear to show it exactly how to avoid being eaten.
How does the quote go?
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"-Upton Sinclair
And that's why this misunderstanding will never go away.
Our society is truly fucked up if you can't send a stranger a text message without being labeled a creep.
Well, that's one opinion. Do you think this would be somehow different than knocking on a strangers door to ask if she'd like to go out with you? Sounds a little creepy to me. And a lot pathetic.
No, it's not a lot different from knocking on a stranger's door and introducing yourself. The reason why datavirtue may think it acceptable is that before he knocked he was invited by the girl onto her porch so he could read her diary which she left there with the intent that strangers read it. People tend to forget what their open privacy policies on FB really mean; either that or they truly don't understand the implications. All this app does is bridge that gap from a virtual front porch to the actual one, and only for people openly publishing where that IRL front porch is. Creeped out? Stop sharing your location with strangers.
What you just said is exactly right, even though you stated it sarcastically. Police performing official duties in public have no expectation of privacy. When they get home, though, they have the same right to not have their phone calls snooped that every private citizen enjoys in their own home.
Wiretapping laws exist to defend every citizen's reasonable expectation of privacy, an extension of the constitutionally-guaranteed right to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches". Any recording of U.S. citizens' private conversation for the purposes of law enforcement should therefore be a special exception to the rule, not a matter of routine procedure; it is by definition an invasion of privacy, is only acceptable when there is probable cause to suspect a crime is being committed, and even then only under supervision of judicial authority (warrant issued by a judge).
Anyone walking down the street, however, has the right to see anything that's visible to them. Cameras (whether they be still or video) serve as memory augmentation devices; the photographer uses them to help remember what they saw. And, according to this ruling, everyone in the U.S. has the right to photograph anything that they can see from a public place (although that precedent had already been set prior to now). So if they see a policeman arresting someone, they have a right to record it. In contrast, however, the city putting up police cameras everywhere and monitoring it with software that can track an individual's face as it moves from one camera to another is exactly equivalent to close surveillance, another activity that U.S. courts have declared an invasion of privacy.
The biggest difference between private actions here and state actions, however, is the implied threat of force. A private citizen following someone else around the city with a camera without the subject's permission is simply harassing the subject. A policeman doing so is collecting evidence, and does so with authority to detain, arrest, prosecute, and imprison (with authorized used of deadly force if necessary to perform such acts). It is a violation of the subject's rights regardless of who is doing it (be it a private citizen, a police officer/other government official, or a corporation), but I find it particularly offensive when the government i pay for with my taxes and which is supposed to be acting to defend my rights violates them with an implied threat of violence and a "what are you going to do about it" attitude.
I suspect that you're actually just trolling; if that's not the case, however, I hope that I've at least made clearer the position of the people you were mocking in your comment.
Its good to know that Halliburton et. al. are looking in that direction, but I have a feeling that they are going to milk petrochem for energy until every profitable cent is soaked up while waiting for someone else to take the lead and, of course, the up-front costs. Such is life though, innovation doesn't make much money at first, and there is always some boardroom type that sees the dip on the graph and can't look beyond how many dollars he assumes his stock options are worth now, versus how many they'll be worth when they are actually cashed in.
You're probably right. My estimate is that we'll keep using hydrocarbons for energy up to the point where alternative energy is cheaper per joule, and I don't see any way of getting around that - no one in the loop is willing to take a moral stand on the issue. Well owners want to sell to whoever pays the highest price, which is generally the power plants. Home owners want to pay the least possible for electricity, and (here in America at least) are not willing to pay the premium for wind/solar. Until alternative energy sources are cheaper than burning oil/gas we'll keep burning the hydrocarbon. I'm just afraid that it'll take a real peak oil scenario to make that happen, raising the price on lubricant oil and everything made out of plastic.
A bit more OT, I've jokingly called Halliburton/KBR my nemesis for years. When KBR still did road construction around here, they always seemed to close off the places I would go most often. Later, when I was doing oceanic research, Halliburton was the operator on a number of projects that directly affected the species I was studying. Not that they were pumping mud all over baby seals or anything, but the noises from seismic and drilling scare the shit out of squid. Scared squid don't behave like content squid, so your data gets pretty screwed. Even later, I had a contract job doing network stuff on rigs, but then Halliburton put the screws to some of the subcontractors on cost, and that job dried up faster than a puddle of piss in the Sahara.
Dude, sorry about your squid. I'm being serious, it's tragic when economic concerns get in the way of good research. The seismic disturbances probably ended when the well came online, but far too late for your project. I'm sure that you and the driller were both on strict time schedules, and that neither of you really had the option to reschedule for the other's convenience. It would do a world of good for the industry to set up an outreach forum for coordination with researchers like you so your time and efforts aren't wasted. Getting it to happen would be like herding cats, though, and making it a government mandate would probably be met with resistance (if not resentment), unfortunately. If you're still in the research field you may want to check with the government agencies managing the leasing and permitting for well construction; there's a chance they would be happy to share with you the relevant schedule info. It would probably be on a state-by-state basis, though, and I have no idea who you'd ask for Gulf of Mexico operations. Good luck with that, and my apologies again for the corrupted research data.
I'm with you; I'd rather see hydrocarbons used as lubricants/raw materials for manufacture than burned as energy. Which makes my job at Halliburton somewhat ironic, but life's funny that way.
The good news is that energy companies (and energy service companies) are eying the alternative energy market as an exit strategy from oil-as-energy. Halliburton does geothermal well cementing, and is trying to advance the art so the wells and plants can be more productive. Challenges include seismic instability, high permeability of the rock layers (you pick places where there are lots of natural fractures), and balancing the need for insulation/strength/durability of the cement. None of these problems are insurmountable, but making geothermal cost competitive with oil is challenging.
I'm personally surprised that we don't see closed-loop geothermal power systems. It seems like they're all farcture-and-collect style systems. Admittedly, fracture-and-collect exposes the water to more surface area of rock, and the wells are cheaper to drill. On the other hand, the operator wouldn't have to deal with produced sand/salt/corrosives that will invariably result from mingling water with rocks downhole, and there wouldn't be any issue with water losses.* If I had to take a guess, though, no-one does it for the same reason that oil/gas operators in the Rockies don't buy downhole sand control solutions - it's an upfront cost that they have to justify to a beancounter rather than an operating cost they can balance against ongoing profits (cost of doing business and all that...).
*Seriously, who approves these lossy geothermal systems in deserts? When there are crops to irrigate and drinking water needed for houses (not to mention sensitive ecosystems) I have trouble seeing how the water use of (big pdf warning!) nearly a gallon per kWh is practical.
Those problems only become issues for people working with heterogeneous data sets
No they also become a problem for any system that deals with future events scheduled by people. Like it or not the real world schedules things on local time and like it or not it is not possible to reliablly convert future times between local time and universal time because the mapping rules can be changed at any time. ..
Consider a user sets a repeating alarm for 7AM local time on every weekday. That user damn well expects an alarm at 7AM local time even if the mapping between local time and universal time has changed in the meantime (either due to a DST jump or a rule change).
You make a good point here. Any alarm clock that wakes me up at the wrong hour because of a DST change is broken. (see footnote)
Consider a user schedules a meeting for 9AM local time on a given day. The users damn well expect that meeting to stay scheulded for 9AM local time even if the mapping rules change between the meeting being scheduled and the meeting happening.
Things get even worse if you have users from different timezones.
I agree again, any calendaring program that doesn't adjust your meeting time for DST is broken. I feel this pain; I work for a company with offices in the U.S. and Norway, and the mismatch between our DST schedule and theirs is a cause of confusion 4 times a year.
Now you have to store which local time an event is scheduled in. Then when an update to the timezone rules come in you have to
1: find any users who are associated with events in foreign timezones. 2: Recompute the translation from the event's local time to the user's local time. 3: See if that translation has changed, if so generate a warning for the user and re-run any conflict checking that your system does.
Sounds like a good plan. I don't see how storing the time as UTC will cause a problem if you're keeping the primary locale and a DST flag as part of the record. The issues you're addressing here will exist regardless of whether the time is stored in UTC or local time, and I can't imagine that having the system store my appointments in US local time and my co-workers appointments in Norwegian local time would be any better; on the contrary, the routines would only get more complex when dealing with mismatched time records. I'd modify the procedure a bit, though:
1: get notified of time zone change 2: find all appointments whose primary locale is in the affected time zone 3: adjust UTC time record to match correct, adjusted meeting time in the primary locale according to the new rule 4: alert attendees for the affected meeting that the time has changed; their client stores the new UTC time, and continues to display it correctly for their local time
My procedure has more steps than yours, but can be easily translated to fast-running database queries. Why are you worrying about future, hypothetical changes to time zone rules when you've already laid out the procedure for adjusting to changes? Store future dates according to the best current information, and adjust as needed when the change comes. Requiring more than that is expecting either the computer or the programmer to be psychic.
Oh and you can't rely on end users computers to reliablly convert between universal time and a given timezone even for times in the past firstly because they may not be up to date and secondly because windows doesn't keep data on historical mapping rules. (emphasis added)
I think this is where we disagree, really. First, anyone coordinating global appointment schedules on their workstation is doing it VERY wrong; that sort of thing should be on a central server (like Exchange). The periodic sync each client does to the central database should also push new time zone rules as needed; the client should never be out of date. Second,
You seem to have misunderstood the point the GP was making. If the computer internally stores the time as UTC then the stored time will always progress forward (UTC isn't affected by DST like GMT is), and behind the scenes it'll always be searchable. It's also about as future-proof as we can make it; if rules regarding leap years or calendaring in general change, you're screwed regardless of which system you're using. The DST translation should be done for display purposes only, based on the user's preferences for localization etc. Proper separation of content versus display logic should solve all of the problems you brought up. Those problems only become issues for people working with heterogeneous data sets (time stored differently in different data stores), in which case you'd expect to be writing translation routines anyways.
When I found out I'd have to log into both Steam and GFWL in order to play DiRT3 it made me glad I hadn't paid money for it; I'd have been demanding a refund otherwise. If Steam were to buy GFWL and get rid of that stupidity I'd be in heaven.
It'll be testing that line from Armageddon where they say that a firecracker in the palm of your hand won't hurt you unless you make a fist around it. They'll mix it in with a bunch of other irrelevant-to-the-plot physics questions from assorted films. If we're really lucky they'll conclude at the end that using nukes to crack an asteroid is a good idea.
If you're using Wikipedia as a reference for how many web sites there were in '95 then you're doing it wrong. And standing on my lawn.
That list you're referencing is the number of sites founded prior to '95 that are still operating today, which is a much shorter list than what was available back then. The internet in '95 was an exciting place, it seemed like everything was available if you knew where to look. Early adopters were rewarded with the opportunity to be part of building the new cyberspace, and it set the stage for the tech bubble of the late '90s; that's certainly true. But if you think it was some kind of barren wasteland you certainly didn't experience it.
You're confusing hardness, strength, and toughness; it's easy to do, considering that laymen use these terms loosely and interchangeably. The researchers in the article were almost certainly using the technical definitions, which are roughly as follows:
Hardness is a measure of how well a material resists deformation. Typical hardness tests involve things like seeing what it will scratch/what scratches it (Mohs scale) or how deeply a probe will dent it under a given load (Rockwell scale). It's used as an indication of wear resistance, and steels used for cutting tools or stamping dies often have high hardness.
Strength is a measure of how much stress (force divided by cross sectional area) is required to permanently deform (yield strength) or break (ultimate strength) a sample of the material. Strength is widely used in engineering design to make sure there is enough material (cross sectional area) to safely handle a given load (force).
Toughness is the energy required to break a sample of the material. This can be found by integrating the area under the stress/strain curve of a tensile test (work = force x distance) or measured directly with purpose-built tools (Izod or Charpy impact test).
Hardness is correlated with strength, and can be used as a non-destructive estimate of strength for finished parts. In contrast, the toughness of samples with the same strength will vary depending on the brittleness of the samples. Ductile samples will stretch a large amount (high strain) before failing and so will have higher toughness than brittle materials of equal strength which won't stretch as far (low strain) before failing.
Given those definitions it's easy to see that even if spider silk had lower strength than steel it could easily have the same or higher toughness if it can stretch far enough. Since spider silk is actually comparable in strength to premium steels and has much better elongation before failure (stretches to 4x original length) I'd expect its toughness to be much higher than steel.
Which I'd rather be smacked in the head with is an entirely different question, that has to to with suitability as a weapon. The steel bar is likely to be denser (therefore heavier) and stiffer than a same-size block of spider silk, so it would probably do more damage to my head at equal speeds. I don't know how the spider silk would do for hardness in bulk, but with better toughness it would likely take more of a beating while keeping its original shape; on the other hand a well-used steel pipe would probably work better as a threat than a new-looking spider silk baton. On the gripping hand, a blackjack made with spider silk would be pretty cool, and I definitely wouldn't want to get hit with one. Pick your poison, I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
It may take congressional authorization to declare war, but as Commander in Chief the President of the U.S. is fully capable of ordering his troops to commit acts of war. Our recent air attacks on Libya are an excellent example; using Air Force and Navy assets to engage the military of a sovereign nation is a clear act of aggression, and would certainly constitute casus belli for them to declare war on us.
As far as I know there is no set procedure for how to handle violations of either Article 1 Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution or the War Powers Resolution. The clearest recourse Congress has for checking presidential power is to bring the President up on articles of impeachment, throwing him out of office. That's a pretty big club, and one that you don't swing lightly.
So what really happens? U.S. presidents do as they see fit, and give Congress a "waddaya gunna dewabboutit?" glare when it gets feisty.
This is the same page that Bing brings up as it's first result.
That's unsurprising, as DDG uses Bing as its backend.
Thanks, that made me smile. If I had mod points I'd give you a +1 funny.
2) In a dim room, your pupils dilate more if the scene before you is mostly dark, and dilated pupils generally produce poorer acuity. A bright background causes your pupils to contract, and just like stopping down a cheap camera lens, it improves the focus of the image hitting your retina.
That's not true for everyone. I checked wikipedia's entry on photographic F-stop, and it suggested that the acuity issue you're experiencing is due to lens defects, as they dominate distortion at large aperture. (note to self: I should have guessed that from point 1 about cataracts...) For people with good lenses, though, bright light reduces acuity as diffraction dominates the distortion at small apertures.
I'm sorry for your eye condition, and you're welcome to continue using a bright screen if that helps you. Please understand, though, that this isn't a one-size-fits-all situation, and don't hate me for using a dark screen if that's better for me.
For most people you have a point. My equation, however, is different:
Locked into AT&T for reasons other than the contract (for me, it's work) + No discount for using unsubsidized phone + No upfront cost for phone = Free phone.
When I started my contract with AT&T they were subsidizing the cost of my phone, but the contract on that phone is up. I haven't switched off because my phone works fine, and has features that I need (works internationally is a big one). If I were to upgrade to this phone it would be effectively free to me, as the price I pay on my cell bill won't change at all. That's not "on the credit card = free" it's "AT&T takes it out of my pocket whether they pay it to Nokia or not".
You sound like someone complaining that the free breakfast buffet at the hotel isn't really free because it's being subsidized by my room's nightly rate. Is going hungry in the morning somehow going to stick it to the man? It won't affect the rental rate of the room whether you eat breakfast or not, the charge is there anyhow. Feel free to stay at a hotel where they charge less per night and make you pay for breakfast if it makes you feel better. Just make sure you come back to let us know where you found it; these days they're all serving free breakfast in the mornings. By which I mean subsidizing the handset costs.
I also remember a project where pictures of criminals were merged together to find what an "average" criminal would look like. The result was surprisingly attractive, and similar to the result from averaging photographs of vegetarians. Neither average was useful for identifying the population it was drawn from. Lesson learned? The "normal" for attractiveness is the average for the population, and a good baseline for attractiveness can be found by averaging multiple pictures of ugly people.
The take-away for you is that you can save your money on supermodel photo shoots, just use mugshots instead. Of course, if you get enough funding totally go for the supermodels. The result will be the same, but the process will be much more enjoyable for you.
I misread that as a play on ipecac, and was wondering how adding an emetic on top of a laxative would improve the situation...
Like some kind of reverse Lytro?
Yes. Also, thank you for making me aware of this not-yet-product. Wow. I can't tell you how much I want one. Two - one for work one for home.
I think that any true 3D display like the GP proposed would need a light field camera to capture the image. Playback would likely be challenging, and i suspect glasses would still be needed for stereo separation; on the other hand, with proper focusing cues and parallax issues resolved the stereo portion might be unnecessary. No stereo = no glasses + full brightness/contrast + accessibility to the monocular population; true light field display = full focal range available + (possibly) paralax. If the technical hurdles inherent in such a display could be overcome, it would truly be the next big thing in displays; I'd pay extra to see a movie in that format, where I won't for the stereo-only 3D.
I think it's rather more like the girl leaving her diary in what she thought was her living room because she doesn't care if her room-mates read it, but didn't realize there was an invisible (to her) portal marketed by a creepy company to creepy creepers for their creeping pleasure. . .
I think you've put your finger on the fundamental disconnect here. Our naive diary author likely switched it to public because, after all, how else will her college friends find her? Once she made it public though, the creepy company started selling her data because, after all, it's public: "What do you mean that isn't what you intended to happen? Why else would you make your diary and location public if you didn't want people to find you? Aren't we simply helping you make it happen?? Why are you complaining???"
Asking for [clarity], though, is like the salmon asking the bear to show it exactly how to avoid being eaten.
How does the quote go?
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"-Upton Sinclair
And that's why this misunderstanding will never go away.
Well, that's one opinion. Do you think this would be somehow different than knocking on a strangers door to ask if she'd like to go out with you? Sounds a little creepy to me. And a lot pathetic.
No, it's not a lot different from knocking on a stranger's door and introducing yourself. The reason why datavirtue may think it acceptable is that before he knocked he was invited by the girl onto her porch so he could read her diary which she left there with the intent that strangers read it. People tend to forget what their open privacy policies on FB really mean; either that or they truly don't understand the implications. All this app does is bridge that gap from a virtual front porch to the actual one, and only for people openly publishing where that IRL front porch is. Creeped out? Stop sharing your location with strangers.
What you just said is exactly right, even though you stated it sarcastically. Police performing official duties in public have no expectation of privacy. When they get home, though, they have the same right to not have their phone calls snooped that every private citizen enjoys in their own home.
Wiretapping laws exist to defend every citizen's reasonable expectation of privacy, an extension of the constitutionally-guaranteed right to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches". Any recording of U.S. citizens' private conversation for the purposes of law enforcement should therefore be a special exception to the rule, not a matter of routine procedure; it is by definition an invasion of privacy, is only acceptable when there is probable cause to suspect a crime is being committed, and even then only under supervision of judicial authority (warrant issued by a judge).
Anyone walking down the street, however, has the right to see anything that's visible to them. Cameras (whether they be still or video) serve as memory augmentation devices; the photographer uses them to help remember what they saw. And, according to this ruling, everyone in the U.S. has the right to photograph anything that they can see from a public place (although that precedent had already been set prior to now). So if they see a policeman arresting someone, they have a right to record it. In contrast, however, the city putting up police cameras everywhere and monitoring it with software that can track an individual's face as it moves from one camera to another is exactly equivalent to close surveillance, another activity that U.S. courts have declared an invasion of privacy.
The biggest difference between private actions here and state actions, however, is the implied threat of force. A private citizen following someone else around the city with a camera without the subject's permission is simply harassing the subject. A policeman doing so is collecting evidence, and does so with authority to detain, arrest, prosecute, and imprison (with authorized used of deadly force if necessary to perform such acts). It is a violation of the subject's rights regardless of who is doing it (be it a private citizen, a police officer/other government official, or a corporation), but I find it particularly offensive when the government i pay for with my taxes and which is supposed to be acting to defend my rights violates them with an implied threat of violence and a "what are you going to do about it" attitude.
I suspect that you're actually just trolling; if that's not the case, however, I hope that I've at least made clearer the position of the people you were mocking in your comment.
Its good to know that Halliburton et. al. are looking in that direction, but I have a feeling that they are going to milk petrochem for energy until every profitable cent is soaked up while waiting for someone else to take the lead and, of course, the up-front costs. Such is life though, innovation doesn't make much money at first, and there is always some boardroom type that sees the dip on the graph and can't look beyond how many dollars he assumes his stock options are worth now, versus how many they'll be worth when they are actually cashed in.
You're probably right. My estimate is that we'll keep using hydrocarbons for energy up to the point where alternative energy is cheaper per joule, and I don't see any way of getting around that - no one in the loop is willing to take a moral stand on the issue. Well owners want to sell to whoever pays the highest price, which is generally the power plants. Home owners want to pay the least possible for electricity, and (here in America at least) are not willing to pay the premium for wind/solar. Until alternative energy sources are cheaper than burning oil/gas we'll keep burning the hydrocarbon. I'm just afraid that it'll take a real peak oil scenario to make that happen, raising the price on lubricant oil and everything made out of plastic.
A bit more OT, I've jokingly called Halliburton/KBR my nemesis for years. When KBR still did road construction around here, they always seemed to close off the places I would go most often. Later, when I was doing oceanic research, Halliburton was the operator on a number of projects that directly affected the species I was studying. Not that they were pumping mud all over baby seals or anything, but the noises from seismic and drilling scare the shit out of squid. Scared squid don't behave like content squid, so your data gets pretty screwed. Even later, I had a contract job doing network stuff on rigs, but then Halliburton put the screws to some of the subcontractors on cost, and that job dried up faster than a puddle of piss in the Sahara.
Dude, sorry about your squid. I'm being serious, it's tragic when economic concerns get in the way of good research. The seismic disturbances probably ended when the well came online, but far too late for your project. I'm sure that you and the driller were both on strict time schedules, and that neither of you really had the option to reschedule for the other's convenience. It would do a world of good for the industry to set up an outreach forum for coordination with researchers like you so your time and efforts aren't wasted. Getting it to happen would be like herding cats, though, and making it a government mandate would probably be met with resistance (if not resentment), unfortunately. If you're still in the research field you may want to check with the government agencies managing the leasing and permitting for well construction; there's a chance they would be happy to share with you the relevant schedule info. It would probably be on a state-by-state basis, though, and I have no idea who you'd ask for Gulf of Mexico operations. Good luck with that, and my apologies again for the corrupted research data.
... or were you talking about basically running a closed loop recirculating system (like the opposite of a radiator)? That would indeed be better.
This, instead of parallel injection and production wells. What you described in your previous post is the current state of the art.
Too bad Brett Favre (pronounced "Farve") didn't get the memo...
I'm with you; I'd rather see hydrocarbons used as lubricants/raw materials for manufacture than burned as energy. Which makes my job at Halliburton somewhat ironic, but life's funny that way.
The good news is that energy companies (and energy service companies) are eying the alternative energy market as an exit strategy from oil-as-energy. Halliburton does geothermal well cementing, and is trying to advance the art so the wells and plants can be more productive. Challenges include seismic instability, high permeability of the rock layers (you pick places where there are lots of natural fractures), and balancing the need for insulation/strength/durability of the cement. None of these problems are insurmountable, but making geothermal cost competitive with oil is challenging.
I'm personally surprised that we don't see closed-loop geothermal power systems. It seems like they're all farcture-and-collect style systems. Admittedly, fracture-and-collect exposes the water to more surface area of rock, and the wells are cheaper to drill. On the other hand, the operator wouldn't have to deal with produced sand/salt/corrosives that will invariably result from mingling water with rocks downhole, and there wouldn't be any issue with water losses.* If I had to take a guess, though, no-one does it for the same reason that oil/gas operators in the Rockies don't buy downhole sand control solutions - it's an upfront cost that they have to justify to a beancounter rather than an operating cost they can balance against ongoing profits (cost of doing business and all that...).
*Seriously, who approves these lossy geothermal systems in deserts? When there are crops to irrigate and drinking water needed for houses (not to mention sensitive ecosystems) I have trouble seeing how the water use of (big pdf warning!) nearly a gallon per kWh is practical.
We need to adapt this for use as a progress bar that runs backwards.
Those problems only become issues for people working with heterogeneous data sets
No they also become a problem for any system that deals with future events scheduled by people. Like it or not the real world schedules things on local time and like it or not it is not possible to reliablly convert future times between local time and universal time because the mapping rules can be changed at any time. . .
Consider a user sets a repeating alarm for 7AM local time on every weekday. That user damn well expects an alarm at 7AM local time even if the mapping between local time and universal time has changed in the meantime (either due to a DST jump or a rule change).
You make a good point here. Any alarm clock that wakes me up at the wrong hour because of a DST change is broken. (see footnote)
Consider a user schedules a meeting for 9AM local time on a given day. The users damn well expect that meeting to stay scheulded for 9AM local time even if the mapping rules change between the meeting being scheduled and the meeting happening.
Things get even worse if you have users from different timezones.
I agree again, any calendaring program that doesn't adjust your meeting time for DST is broken. I feel this pain; I work for a company with offices in the U.S. and Norway, and the mismatch between our DST schedule and theirs is a cause of confusion 4 times a year.
Now you have to store which local time an event is scheduled in. Then when an update to the timezone rules come in you have to
1: find any users who are associated with events in foreign timezones.
2: Recompute the translation from the event's local time to the user's local time.
3: See if that translation has changed, if so generate a warning for the user and re-run any conflict checking that your system does.
Sounds like a good plan. I don't see how storing the time as UTC will cause a problem if you're keeping the primary locale and a DST flag as part of the record. The issues you're addressing here will exist regardless of whether the time is stored in UTC or local time, and I can't imagine that having the system store my appointments in US local time and my co-workers appointments in Norwegian local time would be any better; on the contrary, the routines would only get more complex when dealing with mismatched time records. I'd modify the procedure a bit, though:
1: get notified of time zone change
2: find all appointments whose primary locale is in the affected time zone
3: adjust UTC time record to match correct, adjusted meeting time in the primary locale according to the new rule
4: alert attendees for the affected meeting that the time has changed; their client stores the new UTC time, and continues to display it correctly for their local time
My procedure has more steps than yours, but can be easily translated to fast-running database queries. Why are you worrying about future, hypothetical changes to time zone rules when you've already laid out the procedure for adjusting to changes? Store future dates according to the best current information, and adjust as needed when the change comes. Requiring more than that is expecting either the computer or the programmer to be psychic.
Oh and you can't rely on end users computers to reliablly convert between universal time and a given timezone even for times in the past firstly because they may not be up to date and secondly because windows doesn't keep data on historical mapping rules. (emphasis added)
I think this is where we disagree, really. First, anyone coordinating global appointment schedules on their workstation is doing it VERY wrong; that sort of thing should be on a central server (like Exchange). The periodic sync each client does to the central database should also push new time zone rules as needed; the client should never be out of date. Second,
You seem to have misunderstood the point the GP was making. If the computer internally stores the time as UTC then the stored time will always progress forward (UTC isn't affected by DST like GMT is), and behind the scenes it'll always be searchable. It's also about as future-proof as we can make it; if rules regarding leap years or calendaring in general change, you're screwed regardless of which system you're using. The DST translation should be done for display purposes only, based on the user's preferences for localization etc. Proper separation of content versus display logic should solve all of the problems you brought up. Those problems only become issues for people working with heterogeneous data sets (time stored differently in different data stores), in which case you'd expect to be writing translation routines anyways.
Sounds like a plot for a dystopian fantasy.
A Woman only society raises its children separately. Girls have a full nurtured life. Boychildren are kept in the equivalent of cattle pens . . .
Hmmmm - sure its been done already? :-)
I think it was called Mars Needs Moms . Your take on it would have been more interesting, though.
Thanks, I'll look into that. Honestly it annoyed me enough that I didn't bother trying to figure out the nuances.
Amen, brother!
When I found out I'd have to log into both Steam and GFWL in order to play DiRT3 it made me glad I hadn't paid money for it; I'd have been demanding a refund otherwise. If Steam were to buy GFWL and get rid of that stupidity I'd be in heaven.
It'll be testing that line from Armageddon where they say that a firecracker in the palm of your hand won't hurt you unless you make a fist around it. They'll mix it in with a bunch of other irrelevant-to-the-plot physics questions from assorted films. If we're really lucky they'll conclude at the end that using nukes to crack an asteroid is a good idea.
If you're using Wikipedia as a reference for how many web sites there were in '95 then you're doing it wrong. And standing on my lawn.
That list you're referencing is the number of sites founded prior to '95 that are still operating today, which is a much shorter list than what was available back then. The internet in '95 was an exciting place, it seemed like everything was available if you knew where to look. Early adopters were rewarded with the opportunity to be part of building the new cyberspace, and it set the stage for the tech bubble of the late '90s; that's certainly true. But if you think it was some kind of barren wasteland you certainly didn't experience it.
At least you have good taste in email client =)
If I only had mod points! I thought of the same thing immediately.
Remember, stay with Fiona Wallice as your therapist, because going to a different therapist would be a breach of her intellectual property =)
You're confusing hardness, strength, and toughness; it's easy to do, considering that laymen use these terms loosely and interchangeably. The researchers in the article were almost certainly using the technical definitions, which are roughly as follows:
Hardness is a measure of how well a material resists deformation. Typical hardness tests involve things like seeing what it will scratch/what scratches it (Mohs scale) or how deeply a probe will dent it under a given load (Rockwell scale). It's used as an indication of wear resistance, and steels used for cutting tools or stamping dies often have high hardness.
Strength is a measure of how much stress (force divided by cross sectional area) is required to permanently deform (yield strength) or break (ultimate strength) a sample of the material. Strength is widely used in engineering design to make sure there is enough material (cross sectional area) to safely handle a given load (force).
Toughness is the energy required to break a sample of the material. This can be found by integrating the area under the stress/strain curve of a tensile test (work = force x distance) or measured directly with purpose-built tools (Izod or Charpy impact test).
Hardness is correlated with strength, and can be used as a non-destructive estimate of strength for finished parts. In contrast, the toughness of samples with the same strength will vary depending on the brittleness of the samples. Ductile samples will stretch a large amount (high strain) before failing and so will have higher toughness than brittle materials of equal strength which won't stretch as far (low strain) before failing.
Given those definitions it's easy to see that even if spider silk had lower strength than steel it could easily have the same or higher toughness if it can stretch far enough. Since spider silk is actually comparable in strength to premium steels and has much better elongation before failure (stretches to 4x original length) I'd expect its toughness to be much higher than steel.
Which I'd rather be smacked in the head with is an entirely different question, that has to to with suitability as a weapon. The steel bar is likely to be denser (therefore heavier) and stiffer than a same-size block of spider silk, so it would probably do more damage to my head at equal speeds. I don't know how the spider silk would do for hardness in bulk, but with better toughness it would likely take more of a beating while keeping its original shape; on the other hand a well-used steel pipe would probably work better as a threat than a new-looking spider silk baton. On the gripping hand, a blackjack made with spider silk would be pretty cool, and I definitely wouldn't want to get hit with one. Pick your poison, I guess.