If I remember correctly, the tunnel reverts to government ownership after a certain number of years (istr 40 or 50). I found it unlikely at the time of completion, and even more unlikely now, that there would be significant net profitability out of this by that deadline.
Now, if and when the thing is 're-privatized' after nationalization, there will be some option for profitability. But sure won't be the existing entities! (Unless the bribe system works as well here as it's supposed to in China...;-})
Don't you remember the old TV episode of Batman where the Riddler has bugged the Batcave? And he gets the answer for how to complete even the most difficult caper by listening to how Batman and Robin 'solve' his nefarious plan -- then he executes it *just that way* before they can get there to stop it?
Evidently SOMEONE at the FCC watched that episode and knows how to work the hivemind... except now all the best bits can be cherry-picked free. (And an election contributor or other political wheel can be given the $50K, which of course would have happened anyway, but this way there are valid technical solutions too...)
You must be one of those people who think that the word "encyclopaedia" reflects proper Greek spelling rather than an idiot mistake. The diphthong for the suffix having to do with kids is PAID-, not PAED-, if you are going to be pedantic and stuffy about it.
Seriously,even if we accept the diphthong 'ae' as correct British English spelling, the American shift to "pedo" is cognate to things like 'hemo' (for haemo) or eco (for oeco) -- I would note that Fowler accepted this without demur as 'correct' English usage in the '20s.
We will leave aside the false-etymology argument: pes ped- is Latin. Greek, to go with phil-, would be ÏÎÏ...Ï, which even if you 'Americanize' it by whacking out the leading vowel, would transliterate to 'pus' with the combinatorial form 'pod-' To give you an illustration of the American usage, the branch of medicine concerned with children is "pediatrics" -- and that concerned with feet is "podiatry".
While I am at the forefront of those who think that English would have benefited from retaining things like the thorn and aesc, this is NOT one of those places. I am not going to say that you should not promulgate common misspellings that have become accepted through long usage -- just that you shouldn't nit-pick about their being 'correct' merely for that reason...
>If you could produce a neutrino beam of high enough energy...
I presume you mean high enough DENSITY. As with the photoelectric effect, you have two variables: energy and density. Guess which is more significant to a particle with so little interaction?
We won't go into what is required to produce a neutrino flux of 'appropriate' density to work for effective transmutation (we'll leave aside the question of *cost-effective* transmutation for another time) -- Greg Bear has mentioned one prospective source in Anvil of Stars. (But his source might be a wee bit impractical for working with terrestrial nuclear waste!)
Have been doing that since the '60s (albeit in redumentary form) with lamp timers. The approach is still good, still recommended, and has the obvious advantage of dissuading thieves who use Mk.I eyeball instead of just Web inquiry.
The more obvious 'next question' involves spoofing the demand actually reported by the smart meter, or obfuscating the nature of its data. Those sufficiently Christian and green at the same time can be billed for x number of energy units without actually wasting them...
Surely you recognize that 'Gray's' Anatomy isn't the same thing Gray wrote... they just use his name in respect, in the title?
Or do you think that Fred Jane still works for IHS?
Of course, had you actually READ the wiki reference you provided, you might have figured this out, but I guess it was too hard to read past the first paragraph or too...;-}
I used to joke "it's skeuo to you" for those situations where 'paradigm-shifting' elements... remember when the Apple 'desktop' paradigm was new... become the stock 'familiar' items and icons that 'bold new theory' designs feel they have to break away from.
I left the Gnome project precisely because of the then-emphasis on kewl mystery-meat navigation over clear and sensible defaults.
A proper UI will allow you to customize anything to your liking, and automatically adjust the help system and manpages to tell you how your 'customized' system works. Want everything to appear only when you click the little Moon accelerator pedal, or the little Praetorian pi in the corner of the screen? Fine -- JUST DON'T GO CALLING IT THE DEFAULT.
Apple spent all that money back in the '80s figuring out how 'normal' people actually found a graphical UI convenient. They understood the idea -- groundbreaking at the time -- that 15 minutes of nerdy stuff would empower you to run ANY software that would be written on that system in the future. (I should also remind, gently, that DWIM was something actually instantiated by DEC around 1970, and it STILL seems to be missing, at least in effective or truly useful application, in most contemporary stuff... and yes, I include an awful lot of Siri activity in that comment...)
Now the UI seems to be following the lead of old word-processing programs, with more from the firehose being better and better, or less being... well, if you're not in the know, you're not kewl enough to be at the cutting edge anyway. Pity.
All Romney has to do is agree that he will show originals of his tax returns at the same table that Obama shows original copies of his birth certificate and college application...
It might have been better if you had separated out the problems with the pharmaceutical industry correctly:
1) Antibiotics misprescribed, in excessive volume and as a lazy diagnosis or (just plain wrong!) for viral conditions or resistant strains;
2) High prices on necessary drugs "because you can" and then using part of the profit to underwrite legal action against generics;
3) 'Designer drugs' that are patentable only because a radical here or solubilizing ion there is added -- but then, see (2);
4) New drugs put on the market for $$$, purportedly treating silly conditions and then perhaps misapplied to other conditions, that turn out to have a long list of serious side effects and perhaps cause physical harm to the target patients;
5) Excessive advertising directly to the public (I'd argue that yes, ANY advertising of prescription drugs to the public is 'excessive' in a sense) with the budget written off to 'marketing expense' or some similar place where excess profits can be sterilized...
But...
none of those things can possibly be a reason to advocate a system of "therapy" based on a frank and ridiculous conception of the active principle of pharmacology.
Yes, there are cases where 'less than the recommended dosage' of a pharmaceutical turns out to be the effective therapeutic dose -- take Prozac, for example, where the effective dose for many people turns out to be in the 3mg range, but the maker doesn't produce packaged pills or capsules that low. (You dissolve in orange juice or similar acidic solution, and take an aliquot dose...). Yes, there are potentially areas where very small amounts of active material are effective where larger ones might not be -- the example that comes to mind is silver as an antibiotic. But that simply DOES NOT SCALE to the usual homeopathic dose. And in any case, if your theory of therapy depends on some claim that 'like cures like', no matter how cleverly the idea may be disguised with lingo... well, you're not providing helpful medical service that couldn't be rendered just as effectively, and even more cheaply, via similarly packaged and promoted placebo.
Be nice to see a double-blind study that actually demonstrates to an acceptable level of statistical assurance that a homeopathic modality works for the reasons advocated for it. I won't be holding my breath for that, though...
What they needed to do was put the generators in different locations, with different fuel sources, probably even different manufacturers and fuel types. That way an event which affected one would not affect the others, making their vulnerabilities independent events. The generators at reactors 5-6 were located further uphill, and thus survived the tsunami intact and were able to keep the fuel storage tanks there cooled.
No, what they needed to do was:
1) Provide rapid-connect points for emergency power of KNOWN compatibility, hardened and/or sealed against environmental damage;
2) Provided 'offsite-backup' portable generators (vehicle- or aircraft-mounted) again of KNOWN compatibility, with appropriate procedures to get them on site, connected, started and sync'd with minimal time, and minimal exposure;
3) Provided some form of 'protocol translation' between the connections and wiring at the plant and those for ordinary industrial 'package' emergency generators, so that 'emergency-response' devices provided from other sources could be synchronized and put on line even if the dedicated ones weren't available. (This might include either rotary or solid-state frequency conversion between 50 and 60Hz as needed).
IIRC, the problem wasn't that emergency generation wasn't available to replace the tsunami-damaged generators (or seawater-contaminated diesel supply systems) -- it's that nothing could be found that would work, or even be kludged in the time available.
I could go into the question of 'what sane engineer puts the spent-fuel pool on the roof, in a known seismic zone', but that's just more of the same sort of thinking that gave us the Fukushima emergency generators...
No, we can get it right; it's just that we're still using the old airframe technology.
We stopped working toward better airframes with the end of (choose one) the B-70, the 2707, or Bartini's A-57. Even the Shuttle is an abortive kludge of aluminum construction with fancy short-term insulation -- and Columbia proved to our sorrow just how disgraceful that kludge was.
I suppose the 'nice' part is that so much of the titanium and other exotic-metal fabrication tech was done, and is essentially costed-down, today... for when we arrive at a need for it. That need is certainly not in place for NY-LA in something as slow as endoatmospheric Mach 6 -- the sonic-boom problem is still there, perhaps with considerably more energy in parts of the noise power spectrum. You'd need a full semiballistic trajectory with the acceleration and deceleration 'transition' phases out over the ocean somewhere to get the trick to work NY-LA... but the flight time, even measured 'correctly' (say from wheels-off to touchdown) might be less than 60 minutes, net of all maneuvering. Just don't ask about the fuel bill! (Go back and look at the old Lockheed GOOFUS report about commercial hypersonic 'transports'...)
It's pretty clear that in the age of any "practical" hypersonic aircraft, endoatmospheric or semiballistic, passengers who can afford the service will NOT be ambling through security lines with the hoi. Regardless of how capacious the aircraft are.
In fact, I'd expect that along with the technology would come a 'pre-approved' security list, with some combination of biometrics and other ID data, that will permit the 'privileged' to pass quickly through the airport infrastructure... WITHOUT compromising the level of security that supposedly exists today. (And if this technology comes at a higher price to the travelers concerned... well, if they had to ask, they couldn't afford it, either...;-})
Ashes? Do you really think a catastrophic failure at piddling Mach 6 will burn people to ashes?
Hint: They recovered bodies from Columbia. And did postmortems on them that revealed the actual cause of death from hypersonic accident: autogenous shockwaves.
The aerodynamic heating is the result of protracted powered flight. Stop the propulsion and the pieces will slow down FAST.
Mach 25+, in plunging recovery trajectory... maybe. But surely not Mach 6 to 10.
Now, you could have made the point about just about any incident to a hypersonic aircraft resulting, nearly inevitably, in 100% fatalities. Hamburger is not much less appalling than ashes. On the other hand, commercial crashes very often produce that level of trauma (albeit by 'other means') and that doesn't seem to be dissuading a wide range of people from flying...
Another point you meant to make is that, since so much of a turbojet/fan engine's power is needed to drive the compressor, much more of the energy in the scramjet's fuel can be translated into actual propulsion impulse.
With regard to the afterburner question... not exactly, but look at the SR-71 for an example of how an engine can transition from turbine to ramjet power. Problem is that a scramjet configuration doesn't work as well transitioning around 'round' engines, so there are problems not only with jet but also with PDEs like the 'Aurora' engines. (Probably best to keep the two power systems strictly separate, and optimize each for its 'best' speed range and fuel characteristics...)
1) the trip still takes 2 more hours; 2) the trip still probably costs hundreds more 3) now I'll have all kinds of problems connecting to compromised airport hotspots (etc. etc. etc.)
Note that everyone but the driver can be using telephone broadband, or perhaps satellite, while traveling; all the other examples of entertainment or useful activity probably translate at least as well to riding in your own car as sitting in some airport lounge... and you don't need to worry about your checked bags being pilfered, or your carryons being cause for red alert if left unattended...
Uh-huh, and let's look at the 'inert' ingredients.
Back in the old days, a common term for the placebo in oral testing was 'sugar pill'. Wonder what kind of sugar was in there, and what biological 'side' effects it might produce? If the testing is done with pills that are designed to appear similar to prescription, there may be dyes that are 'supposedly' inert.
There is also the question that the cohort in the trial does not consist of 'normal' healthy people. I advocated years ago that a good 'double-blind' test should also include an equal cohort of nominally-healthy people (at any rate, people not showing signs of or markers for the condition being treated) to determine whether side effects were proportional to impaired health or its physiological consequences.
Yes, we knew about this 'nocebo' effect at least 35 years ago (in New York, at Columbia Presbyterian, at least)/ You would be surprised at how the tension and fear about illness translates into biological response at medication time, completely aside from any exaggerative or Munchausen tendencies in patients...
The only problem with the later Heinlein women is that they always seem to be 'smelling pretty whiff' and needing to take baths all the time... puts a damper on the orgy bit.
I think you've figured it out: a solution to MS' present woes is...
NAMING RIGHTS!
Highest bidder gets to name parts of the framework or interface. Can't be any dumber than the present stadium/arena system... and if Hooters signs up for the magic-number in the Linux kernel they won't have to change the hex value...
Oddly enough, Microsoft already has used the 'reverse' sexist example in.net code: BEEFCACE.
I don't see male programmers complaining in droves that this degrades males, even though it 'does'.
I would be more than a little surprised if any woman programmer 'talented' enough to find this in the kernel would find a magic number related to breast size 'uncomfortable'. Much more likely that she'd laugh at the immaturity of whoever put it there... and move on to analysis or coding as appropriate.
Actually, I'm looking forward to seeing the videos made by the detractors in the MTT2K "competition". Be nice if they were all motivational, precise, and practically perfect in every way.
On the other hand, I plan to have quite a bit of fun and put my Servo hat on for no few of them...
Perhaps it is indeed 'ad hominem (or feminam) but the issue still remains: where are Karim Kai Ani's thousands of free videos? Or, for that matter, her free curriculum guide, lesson plans, etc.? I'd certainly be happy to see them.
I have no quarrel with educators producing a debunking video that shows overt errors. But where is the Grand Valley State University free online curriculum? Yes, it's cute that we now have a contest to see who can find the goofs. But where are the improved versions of free lessons, attractively taught, without the goofs?
Sure, Khan's videos are far from perfect for a great many potential learners. No doubt that they appeal in many cases only to people who are dedicated to learning, and who understand how you backtranslate for imperfect -- or even bad -- pedagogy. It would be nice if they taught more than just the 'cookbook' approach to many of these subjects.
But the right answer is to do a better job of making free education available. MIT has done this. The Annenberg/CPB project did this (I'm thinking in particular of the graphics in "The Mechanical Universe", imho one of the best ways to show mathematical transformations I've seen). I'd think that real educators would be at the forefront of efforts to make widespread introductions to learning free and easily accessible -- and to make multiple versions targeted at different people with different motivations, learning modalities, etc.
Instead we have snarky criticisms when the hedge-fund guy makes silly mistakes. That's a little sad.
This is dangerously dumb advice for any modern diesel engine with precise active injectors, although it was reasonable for older engine designs like OM603s. There are reasons you treat the vegetable-oil feedstock when making biodiesel. Look at the peak temperature and pressure inside a modern unit injector... and then think about vegetable oil coming from God-knows-where, probably with things like grill-cleaning grit and degreasing solution in it, and quite possibly overheated at some point in its life. Do not be surprised if your big savings starts to be... not so big, net of maintenance and service expenses... (and I speak as a proponent of the greasecar movement in general).
In other words, be MUCH more careful about how you filter the 'veggie oil', before it goes in the tank as well as when it goes to the injection system, and be prepared to conduct some -- perhaps most -- of the appropriate steps for biodiesel purification.
By the way -- looked at the relative availability of WVO 'cheap' or 'free' lately? I would not depend on this source for low-cost net-of-all-expenses fueling for very much longer...
Diesels aren't entirely happy starting on straight WVO, either; that's why most of these systems include starting on dino/biodiesel as well as shutdown/purge to get the stuff out of the fuel system.
... a large established corporation founded and largely staffed by people who used to be teenagers writing operating systems in their parents' basements?...
Slashdot Mirror
If I remember correctly, the tunnel reverts to government ownership after a certain number of years (istr 40 or 50). I found it unlikely at the time of completion, and even more unlikely now, that there would be significant net profitability out of this by that deadline.
Now, if and when the thing is 're-privatized' after nationalization, there will be some option for profitability. But sure won't be the existing entities! (Unless the bribe system works as well here as it's supposed to in China... ;-})
Don't you remember the old TV episode of Batman where the Riddler has bugged the Batcave? And he gets the answer for how to complete even the most difficult caper by listening to how Batman and Robin 'solve' his nefarious plan -- then he executes it *just that way* before they can get there to stop it?
Evidently SOMEONE at the FCC watched that episode and knows how to work the hivemind... except now all the best bits can be cherry-picked free. (And an election contributor or other political wheel can be given the $50K, which of course would have happened anyway, but this way there are valid technical solutions too...)
Carry on /.ers!
(Can I start a meme? Rick-Trolled?)
No, but you could channel Ed Khil...
"Trollolo-Leo! Troll Leo! Troll Leo! Low, low, low, low..."
You mean your NAMBLA types are hexaploid?
You must be one of those people who think that the word "encyclopaedia" reflects proper Greek spelling rather than an idiot mistake. The diphthong for the suffix having to do with kids is PAID-, not PAED-, if you are going to be pedantic and stuffy about it.
Seriously,even if we accept the diphthong 'ae' as correct British English spelling, the American shift to "pedo" is cognate to things like 'hemo' (for haemo) or eco (for oeco) -- I would note that Fowler accepted this without demur as 'correct' English usage in the '20s.
We will leave aside the false-etymology argument: pes ped- is Latin. Greek, to go with phil-, would be ÏÎÏ...Ï, which even if you 'Americanize' it by whacking out the leading vowel, would transliterate to 'pus' with the combinatorial form 'pod-' To give you an illustration of the American usage, the branch of medicine concerned with children is "pediatrics" -- and that concerned with feet is "podiatry".
While I am at the forefront of those who think that English would have benefited from retaining things like the thorn and aesc, this is NOT one of those places. I am not going to say that you should not promulgate common misspellings that have become accepted through long usage -- just that you shouldn't nit-pick about their being 'correct' merely for that reason...
>If you could produce a neutrino beam of high enough energy...
I presume you mean high enough DENSITY. As with the photoelectric effect, you have two variables: energy and density. Guess which is more significant to a particle with so little interaction?
We won't go into what is required to produce a neutrino flux of 'appropriate' density to work for effective transmutation (we'll leave aside the question of *cost-effective* transmutation for another time) -- Greg Bear has mentioned one prospective source in Anvil of Stars. (But his source might be a wee bit impractical for working with terrestrial nuclear waste!)
Have been doing that since the '60s (albeit in redumentary form) with lamp timers. The approach is still good, still recommended, and has the obvious advantage of dissuading thieves who use Mk.I eyeball instead of just Web inquiry.
The more obvious 'next question' involves spoofing the demand actually reported by the smart meter, or obfuscating the nature of its data. Those sufficiently Christian and green at the same time can be billed for x number of energy units without actually wasting them...
Lord, this is funny... 'the book from Henry Gray'
Surely you recognize that 'Gray's' Anatomy isn't the same thing Gray wrote... they just use his name in respect, in the title?
Or do you think that Fred Jane still works for IHS?
Of course, had you actually READ the wiki reference you provided, you might have figured this out, but I guess it was too hard to read past the first paragraph or too... ;-}
As one of the four...
Yes, safe, but Sophos for Macs is free. No 'business cost' there...
I used to joke "it's skeuo to you" for those situations where 'paradigm-shifting' elements... remember when the Apple 'desktop' paradigm was new... become the stock 'familiar' items and icons that 'bold new theory' designs feel they have to break away from.
I left the Gnome project precisely because of the then-emphasis on kewl mystery-meat navigation over clear and sensible defaults.
A proper UI will allow you to customize anything to your liking, and automatically adjust the help system and manpages to tell you how your 'customized' system works. Want everything to appear only when you click the little Moon accelerator pedal, or the little Praetorian pi in the corner of the screen? Fine -- JUST DON'T GO CALLING IT THE DEFAULT.
Apple spent all that money back in the '80s figuring out how 'normal' people actually found a graphical UI convenient. They understood the idea -- groundbreaking at the time -- that 15 minutes of nerdy stuff would empower you to run ANY software that would be written on that system in the future. (I should also remind, gently, that DWIM was something actually instantiated by DEC around 1970, and it STILL seems to be missing, at least in effective or truly useful application, in most contemporary stuff... and yes, I include an awful lot of Siri activity in that comment...)
Now the UI seems to be following the lead of old word-processing programs, with more from the firehose being better and better, or less being... well, if you're not in the know, you're not kewl enough to be at the cutting edge anyway. Pity.
All Romney has to do is agree that he will show originals of his tax returns at the same table that Obama shows original copies of his birth certificate and college application...
It might have been better if you had separated out the problems with the pharmaceutical industry correctly:
1) Antibiotics misprescribed, in excessive volume and as a lazy diagnosis or (just plain wrong!) for viral conditions or resistant strains;
2) High prices on necessary drugs "because you can" and then using part of the profit to underwrite legal action against generics;
3) 'Designer drugs' that are patentable only because a radical here or solubilizing ion there is added -- but then, see (2);
4) New drugs put on the market for $$$, purportedly treating silly conditions and then perhaps misapplied to other conditions, that turn out to have a long list of serious side effects and perhaps cause physical harm to the target patients;
5) Excessive advertising directly to the public (I'd argue that yes, ANY advertising of prescription drugs to the public is 'excessive' in a sense) with the budget written off to 'marketing expense' or some similar place where excess profits can be sterilized...
But...
none of those things can possibly be a reason to advocate a system of "therapy" based on a frank and ridiculous conception of the active principle of pharmacology.
Yes, there are cases where 'less than the recommended dosage' of a pharmaceutical turns out to be the effective therapeutic dose -- take Prozac, for example, where the effective dose for many people turns out to be in the 3mg range, but the maker doesn't produce packaged pills or capsules that low. (You dissolve in orange juice or similar acidic solution, and take an aliquot dose...). Yes, there are potentially areas where very small amounts of active material are effective where larger ones might not be -- the example that comes to mind is silver as an antibiotic. But that simply DOES NOT SCALE to the usual homeopathic dose. And in any case, if your theory of therapy depends on some claim that 'like cures like', no matter how cleverly the idea may be disguised with lingo... well, you're not providing helpful medical service that couldn't be rendered just as effectively, and even more cheaply, via similarly packaged and promoted placebo.
Be nice to see a double-blind study that actually demonstrates to an acceptable level of statistical assurance that a homeopathic modality works for the reasons advocated for it. I won't be holding my breath for that, though...
What they needed to do was put the generators in different locations, with different fuel sources, probably even different manufacturers and fuel types. That way an event which affected one would not affect the others, making their vulnerabilities independent events. The generators at reactors 5-6 were located further uphill, and thus survived the tsunami intact and were able to keep the fuel storage tanks there cooled.
No, what they needed to do was:
1) Provide rapid-connect points for emergency power of KNOWN compatibility, hardened and/or sealed against environmental damage;
2) Provided 'offsite-backup' portable generators (vehicle- or aircraft-mounted) again of KNOWN compatibility, with appropriate procedures to get them on site, connected, started and sync'd with minimal time, and minimal exposure;
3) Provided some form of 'protocol translation' between the connections and wiring at the plant and those for ordinary industrial 'package' emergency generators, so that 'emergency-response' devices provided from other sources could be synchronized and put on line even if the dedicated ones weren't available. (This might include either rotary or solid-state frequency conversion between 50 and 60Hz as needed).
IIRC, the problem wasn't that emergency generation wasn't available to replace the tsunami-damaged generators (or seawater-contaminated diesel supply systems) -- it's that nothing could be found that would work, or even be kludged in the time available.
I could go into the question of 'what sane engineer puts the spent-fuel pool on the roof, in a known seismic zone', but that's just more of the same sort of thinking that gave us the Fukushima emergency generators...
No, we can get it right; it's just that we're still using the old airframe technology.
We stopped working toward better airframes with the end of (choose one) the B-70, the 2707, or Bartini's A-57. Even the Shuttle is an abortive kludge of aluminum construction with fancy short-term insulation -- and Columbia proved to our sorrow just how disgraceful that kludge was.
I suppose the 'nice' part is that so much of the titanium and other exotic-metal fabrication tech was done, and is essentially costed-down, today... for when we arrive at a need for it. That need is certainly not in place for NY-LA in something as slow as endoatmospheric Mach 6 -- the sonic-boom problem is still there, perhaps with considerably more energy in parts of the noise power spectrum. You'd need a full semiballistic trajectory with the acceleration and deceleration 'transition' phases out over the ocean somewhere to get the trick to work NY-LA... but the flight time, even measured 'correctly' (say from wheels-off to touchdown) might be less than 60 minutes, net of all maneuvering. Just don't ask about the fuel bill! (Go back and look at the old Lockheed GOOFUS report about commercial hypersonic 'transports'...)
It's pretty clear that in the age of any "practical" hypersonic aircraft, endoatmospheric or semiballistic, passengers who can afford the service will NOT be ambling through security lines with the hoi. Regardless of how capacious the aircraft are.
In fact, I'd expect that along with the technology would come a 'pre-approved' security list, with some combination of biometrics and other ID data, that will permit the 'privileged' to pass quickly through the airport infrastructure... WITHOUT compromising the level of security that supposedly exists today. (And if this technology comes at a higher price to the travelers concerned... well, if they had to ask, they couldn't afford it, either... ;-})
Ashes? Do you really think a catastrophic failure at piddling Mach 6 will burn people to ashes?
Hint: They recovered bodies from Columbia. And did postmortems on them that revealed the actual cause of death from hypersonic accident: autogenous shockwaves.
The aerodynamic heating is the result of protracted powered flight. Stop the propulsion and the pieces will slow down FAST.
Mach 25+, in plunging recovery trajectory... maybe. But surely not Mach 6 to 10.
Now, you could have made the point about just about any incident to a hypersonic aircraft resulting, nearly inevitably, in 100% fatalities. Hamburger is not much less appalling than ashes. On the other hand, commercial crashes very often produce that level of trauma (albeit by 'other means') and that doesn't seem to be dissuading a wide range of people from flying...
Another point you meant to make is that, since so much of a turbojet/fan engine's power is needed to drive the compressor, much more of the energy in the scramjet's fuel can be translated into actual propulsion impulse.
With regard to the afterburner question... not exactly, but look at the SR-71 for an example of how an engine can transition from turbine to ramjet power. Problem is that a scramjet configuration doesn't work as well transitioning around 'round' engines, so there are problems not only with jet but also with PDEs like the 'Aurora' engines. (Probably best to keep the two power systems strictly separate, and optimize each for its 'best' speed range and fuel characteristics...)
OK, fine... now
1) the trip still takes 2 more hours;
2) the trip still probably costs hundreds more
3) now I'll have all kinds of problems connecting to compromised airport hotspots (etc. etc. etc.)
Note that everyone but the driver can be using telephone broadband, or perhaps satellite, while traveling; all the other examples of entertainment or useful activity probably translate at least as well to riding in your own car as sitting in some airport lounge... and you don't need to worry about your checked bags being pilfered, or your carryons being cause for red alert if left unattended...
Uh-huh, and let's look at the 'inert' ingredients.
Back in the old days, a common term for the placebo in oral testing was 'sugar pill'. Wonder what kind of sugar was in there, and what biological 'side' effects it might produce? If the testing is done with pills that are designed to appear similar to prescription, there may be dyes that are 'supposedly' inert.
There is also the question that the cohort in the trial does not consist of 'normal' healthy people. I advocated years ago that a good 'double-blind' test should also include an equal cohort of nominally-healthy people (at any rate, people not showing signs of or markers for the condition being treated) to determine whether side effects were proportional to impaired health or its physiological consequences.
Yes, we knew about this 'nocebo' effect at least 35 years ago (in New York, at Columbia Presbyterian, at least)/ You would be surprised at how the tension and fear about illness translates into biological response at medication time, completely aside from any exaggerative or Munchausen tendencies in patients...
The only problem with the later Heinlein women is that they always seem to be 'smelling pretty whiff' and needing to take baths all the time... puts a damper on the orgy bit.
I think you've figured it out: a solution to MS' present woes is...
NAMING RIGHTS!
Highest bidder gets to name parts of the framework or interface. Can't be any dumber than the present stadium/arena system... and if Hooters signs up for the magic-number in the Linux kernel they won't have to change the hex value...
Oddly enough, Microsoft already has used the 'reverse' sexist example in .net code: BEEFCACE.
I don't see male programmers complaining in droves that this degrades males, even though it 'does'.
I would be more than a little surprised if any woman programmer 'talented' enough to find this in the kernel would find a magic number related to breast size 'uncomfortable'. Much more likely that she'd laugh at the immaturity of whoever put it there... and move on to analysis or coding as appropriate.
Actually, I'm looking forward to seeing the videos made by the detractors in the MTT2K "competition". Be nice if they were all motivational, precise, and practically perfect in every way.
On the other hand, I plan to have quite a bit of fun and put my Servo hat on for no few of them...
Perhaps it is indeed 'ad hominem (or feminam) but the issue still remains: where are Karim Kai Ani's thousands of free videos? Or, for that matter, her free curriculum guide, lesson plans, etc.? I'd certainly be happy to see them.
I have no quarrel with educators producing a debunking video that shows overt errors. But where is the Grand Valley State University free online curriculum? Yes, it's cute that we now have a contest to see who can find the goofs. But where are the improved versions of free lessons, attractively taught, without the goofs?
Sure, Khan's videos are far from perfect for a great many potential learners. No doubt that they appeal in many cases only to people who are dedicated to learning, and who understand how you backtranslate for imperfect -- or even bad -- pedagogy. It would be nice if they taught more than just the 'cookbook' approach to many of these subjects.
But the right answer is to do a better job of making free education available. MIT has done this. The Annenberg/CPB project did this (I'm thinking in particular of the graphics in "The Mechanical Universe", imho one of the best ways to show mathematical transformations I've seen). I'd think that real educators would be at the forefront of efforts to make widespread introductions to learning free and easily accessible -- and to make multiple versions targeted at different people with different motivations, learning modalities, etc.
Instead we have snarky criticisms when the hedge-fund guy makes silly mistakes. That's a little sad.
This is dangerously dumb advice for any modern diesel engine with precise active injectors, although it was reasonable for older engine designs like OM603s. There are reasons you treat the vegetable-oil feedstock when making biodiesel. Look at the peak temperature and pressure inside a modern unit injector... and then think about vegetable oil coming from God-knows-where, probably with things like grill-cleaning grit and degreasing solution in it, and quite possibly overheated at some point in its life. Do not be surprised if your big savings starts to be... not so big, net of maintenance and service expenses... (and I speak as a proponent of the greasecar movement in general).
In other words, be MUCH more careful about how you filter the 'veggie oil', before it goes in the tank as well as when it goes to the injection system, and be prepared to conduct some -- perhaps most -- of the appropriate steps for biodiesel purification.
By the way -- looked at the relative availability of WVO 'cheap' or 'free' lately? I would not depend on this source for low-cost net-of-all-expenses fueling for very much longer...
Diesels aren't entirely happy starting on straight WVO, either; that's why most of these systems include starting on dino/biodiesel as well as shutdown/purge to get the stuff out of the fuel system.
... a large established corporation founded and largely staffed by people who used to be teenagers writing operating systems in their parents' basements? ...