I have always wondered whether aero or car designers would mimic the effects of the golf ball pock marks to get some extra efficiency.
Many aircraft designs do. But instead of dimples, they look like short bits of sheet metal sticking up from the wing. They're called Vortex Generators, abbreviated VG.
VGs are designed to reduce the turbulence associated with the boundary layer. They can improve take-off performance, engine out flight performance on multi-engine aircraft, and they can improve control effectiveness and/or reduce landing speeds. I've never heard of VGs actually improving cruise speed in any measurable way.
As for improved efficiency after the aircraft had been dented, I doubt it. Modern aircraft wings are very carefully designed to operate well over a wide range of flight conditions.
Clearly this pilot ought to be thanking his lucky stars that the wings of his aircraft were designed to withstand this kind of abuse. Given what I've read about the (Sc)airbus rudder certification procedures, he ought to be very thankful that the aircraft held together at all.
If I were that pilot, I'd book attendence to one of Dave Gwinn's courses on how to read onboard weather radar. Clearly he missed something.
If I had any points I'd mod you down. Your reference's case is irrelevant to this issue.
The facts are very simple. Allowing patents on business processes was a stupid idea. The only beneficiaries are the folks who can file a submarine patent, watch someone else think of it too, and then after they've made the effort to develop the idea, sue them.
The $35M verdict is probably peanuts for EBay, but that doesn't lessen the wrongfulness. This is how you kill inventiveness and creativity: By allowing leeches such as this to win.
Umm, folks, competing standards are often a result of competing interests. After all, why did Ogg-Vorbis happen? Why do we have different file system standards?
It's not because there should be the one true standard of everything, but that there should be a purpose behind the standard dictating the goals. Some may be more efficient, some may have been easier to implement, some may have been selected for interoperability. These goals often intersect, but not always.
You might as well ask your grocery store to supply just one do-it-all fruit.
Charles Atlas Weakling Candidate slouches down street with PowerBook, trying to look cool in his new Jacket.
"Maybe I'll attract a Nerd-Grrrl..." he thinks.
Gets rolled by two ton nerd high on too many twinkies.
ZAAAZZ!
Fat nerd dies of heart attack. Kid gets hauled off to jail for manslaughter --oh and his Powerbook is toast. I guess we won't see many of the/. crowd with this one, huh?
Don't use a 15' dish. Don't use a 1W amp. Don't point it at your little sisters hamster.
Actually, even in the near field pattern, a fifteen foot dish would not do a damned thing to your little sister's hamster. It would be well within ANSI exposure limits even at one watt.
I know this because I had to evaluate a similar situation were some roofers were working in front of an industrial communications microwave dish many years ago. Naturally they were paranoid after seeing so many sci-fi movies with great big dishes beaming death rays.
Still, I was able to show that we were getting close to the galactic noise level for near field exposure (our dish was an eight foot diameter with 10 mW on 6 GHz). Nevertheless the poobahs put their heads together and some ignorant dufus allowed these roofers to insert a clause in thir contract that we would power off the transmitter for this dish while they worked in front of it.
So we shut off the link. Down went the facility PBX trunks. Down went our two way radio communications, down went local police and fire receiver systems, down went some transmitter links for the county police. And the roofers went to work. While they were working, we went upstairs and pulled the supervisor aside.
"See that dish on that water tower over there?" I asked. "That's the other end of this microwave link. You could stand in front of this dish for your entire life and die of boredom before it did anything to you. Well, we turned off the transmitter at this end because you idiots somehow got our company to agree that not having police, fire, telephone and telemetry data is safer than exposure to this dish. But the other end of this link is still beaming microwaves at you. You didn't ask us to turn it off, so we didn't. I hope you're happy. "
I like fuel cells. I think they have a lot of future to them. However, installing them in to weight critical applications doesn't make sense.
Modern piston, turbo-jet, and turbo-fan engines aren't efficient compared to a fuel cell. What they have to offer is high power to weight ratio. Remember, for every weight unit of fuel they burn, they suck in as much as fifteen times that weight in air. What they're really burning is not the Jet-A or Avgas, it's air. That's a hell of a lot of weight they don't have to carry.
Now, fast forward to fuel cells. Yes, their efficiency can be quite high --but they have to carry all their propellant, not just 1/15 of it. Unless someone figures out how to engineer some kind of fuel cell which uses air as a reactant, I just don't see how such a thing will be practical.
Ok, I assume you're talking about an airliner and you're talking about getting real close to it. You would probably trash some or all of the avionics and maybe some of the fly by wire stuff --but not enough to make a substantial difference.
Here's something you need to consider. Electrically, HERF is not that different than a Lightning Strike. Most recently certified aircraft are supposedly tested against lightning. Every year several hundred airliners are struck by lighting. It happens more often than most people realize. And in most cases, it's a non-event.
As for smaller aircraft, it has to be one hell of a HERF to do anything to an AvGas burning piston engined airplane. Yes, they use magnetos. Not just one, but two independent magnetos each with completely seperate plugs in the same cylinder. Anything which could trash two sets of magnetos would also have to be enough to cook the pilot. Once again, you could trash the avionics in most small aircraft, and they'd keep on running.
As further proof that this is not the threat it is made out to be, I've been through flight training exercises where I was asked to shut off the master switch for all electrically operated gear while enroute on instruments at night (wearing foggles so that I could not see outside). I still had all the vacuum powered gyro instruments and my trusty pocket flashlight which I clipped in to my headset so that I could see what the AI (attitude indicator) and HI (gyroscopic heading indicator) looked like.
Truthfully, pilots have more to fear from a laser attack at night than they do from a HERF gun.
If Usenet weren't relevant and useful few would make so much effort to reproduce it in other forms, such as e-mail lists or Slashdot.
Are there flaws in NNTP? I think it could be improved with some form of authentication to help guarantee that the source address of a post can't be forged.
However, the beauty of Usenet is that anyone can post there. Yes, that's also the flaw.
The problem is that we're all seeking quality answers and interesting discussions, but nobody can agree on just what we need to do to achieve that result. Even if there were no off-topic posts and everyone behaved like ladies and gentlemen, there would inevitably be people who want to read more basic information and people who want to read more advanced techniques.
Not having to rely on people to set the agenda is what makes Usenet so engaging to me. It's fast, it's a big free-for-all, and yes, there's lots of nonsense and wrong information. The best solution is to do what most people are simply too lazy to bother with: build a healthy kill-file and a substantial watch list. One person's troll is another person's jester.
I have grown used to rude behavior on the Internet. Anonymity can lead to this sort of thing. However, the same anonymity is what enables many to speak what's on their mind. While this can result in a very low signal to noise ratio, it also results in very candid experiences and ideas.
It's worth the effort to find those ideas and ferret them out of the background noise. Nobody can do that for you. That's what is so great about Usenet.
Aircraft should be designed and/or modified to ensure that this cannot become a problem. how difficult can it be, given the obstacles that have already been overcome in the field of aviation?
In my arrogant and well informed opinion as both an electrical engineer and as an instrument rated private pilot, you need a reality check.
Modern aviation is not really so modern. Most aircraft flying today are from designs decades old. Avionics technology mostly comes from the 1950s and 1960s. It didn't take spread spectrum signalling in to account because it was mostly unknown back then.
These days, a precision instrument landing takes place with a system which depends on paired VHF and UHF channels using an AM signal to let the avionics know whether to go to the right/left or up/down. It's quite precise. It will place you at a window of airspace sometimes only 100' high +/- a few feet vertically and +/- about ten feet horizontally.
These systems cost in excess of $1M per runway to implement. It has been ossified in place around the world thanks to a bunch of international agreements based on this technology. Coordinating a new system for implementation among a world-wide forum of countries is damn near impossible. As long as this scheme works, it will be very hard to replace.
Further, aircraft electronics have to be very carefully hardened against things you would never consider in the rest of the world. For example, it has to withstand a lightning strike. Several hundred aircraft are struck by lightning every year. Thanks to this kind of certification such strikes are mostly a non-event. It also has to withstand temperature extremes that even automotive electronics might have trouble with.
Thus the certification process is long and difficult, the production quantities are relatively small, and the cost is hideous. The King KX-155 radios in my aircraft cost $2500 each to replace (with reconditioned radios) several years ago.
And then there are those who say "I'll use it and if it gives the pilot trouble, I'll just turn it off." The problem is that the only way the pilots will figure out that you're doing something to the navigation system is to figure out which navigation system is being affected. That's not an easy thing to do. Then, they have to figure out where the source of interference is coming from. Then they have to somehow explain to the cabin crew what to look for and how to turn it off. Meanwhile, the workload in the flight deck goes way up.
The only solution that will allow you the freedom to use your PDA is to put you guys in to a faraday shield. To do that you'd have to rip out the interior of the aircraft and install a metal screen around the entire cabin. Nobody in their right mind is going to do that unless new government regulations come out mandating this sort of thing.
In any case, very few aircraft cabins are deliberately designed to be isolated in this manner. If you want to know more, start here and keep reading.
I admit, the probability that something will go wrong is in fact quite small. But if things do go wrong, you and every other person on that aircraft could easily become the next big smoking crater somewhere. Are you willing to risk not only your life, but everyone else's life on board the airliner, just to get a few more minutes with your PDA?
2) What "poisons" this fuel cell? Will it survive a bit of water?
3) What are the by-products of power generation? Can it be used to store energy too?
4) How many watts per kg or liter?
Sheesh. And it's only been tested for a few months. I'll bet there are at least a few unknowns yet to be discovered. Nontheless, the concept is interesting. The question is whether this can become a practical commercial device. You can't even begin to guess with shoddy reporting like this...
Once upon a time I was a volunteer at the Smithsonian information desk. We always knew that every now and then someone would get approached with "The Dillinger Question."
The urban legend was that the infamous John Dillinger's penis was abnormally large. So large, in fact, that when raped women, his penis would kill them due to internal hemoraging. This penis was supposedly removed postumously and sent to (A) The Smithsonian or (B) The Walter Reed Army Medical Museum.
Naturally, people would approach the information desk every now and then wanting to know where it was.
Note that the date on this post is April 2. The urban legend exists; and yes, I was personally asked about it by a visitor (I could hardly contain my laughter). The information desk manual had all the appropriate disclaimers catagorized under D for Dillinger.
I'm an UN-certified electrical engineer. I work with Electrical, Civil, Mechanical, Chemical, Environmental, and Industrial engineers. Some have PE certificates; some don't.
I can say with good experience that the PE ceritificate doesn't prove much. I've seen very smart people with the PE and I've also met an equal number of idiots with the PE. If the PE is a filter, then it needs a great deal of improvement.
I took the EIT class. It was almost all theory. I had thought the EIT and PE were supposed to prove some sort of competence as an engineer; but when I saw what the tests really were, I lost interest. The point of certifying engineers is to show that they know how to translate theory in to reality. The PE and the EIT tests can't possibly do that.
I don't know of any good tests which can prove competence in such things. Only an appreticeship with someone who knows the field can be an effective filter against such mediocrity. Doctors and aircraft pilots are certified this way. As a private pilot, I'll point out that even this method is a lot less effective than I'd like.
No, what really keeps a building up are habits and Engineering Standards. Most engineers I've known are smart enough to use similar approaches. But there is one thing that separates the kids from the adults. The standards are guidelines, not dictat. When you pull these mediocre "standards at all costs" engineers out of their element and drop a problem even slightly outside their normal experience in front of them, they're often at a loss to deal with it.
I should mention the kind of engineering I do is often post mortem. When something doesn't work and it seems like it should have, I get called in. I'm one of the guys in our company who gets to clean up after the people who don't know what they're doing.
So, is writing software or network management the same as engineering? Well, yes and no.
Networks should involve engineering backgrounds. However, few people I see in charge of networking actually understand the data sources, sinks, and typical traffic patterns on their networks. If someone actually does this, then he or she deserves the title of Engineer. The typical fresh faced MSCE graduate doesn't qualify.
In software, I think better theories and tighter standards are needed at the application and user interface level. The Open Source projects help a great deal because they offer several competing examples of how something can be done. I hope that eventually these various approaches can be catagorized, and the trade-offs of these approaches become well known, much as various sort and search algorithms have been documented.
However, because the practice of software is so immature, being more art than science, it's not ready to be called engineering in my opinion. It will get there some day, but it's not there yet. Sorry, folks.
There are laws such as the Electronics Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1996 which actually do make it illegal to receive cellular telephone signals with a scanner.
Those of you who are a bit older may remember the likes of SuperTV which used to broadcast an encoded signal on the air. Many built receive decoders. SuperTV didn't last long. HBO used to broadcast on the Multi-Point Distribution service on 2154 MHz. Anyone remember those "stopsign" boards and coffee can antennas? Those were illegal too under a twisted interpretation the FCC made using certain clauses of the original Radio Secrecy section of the Communications Act of 1934.
No, the FCC is not your friend. The airwaves are not free in the USA. Ask any Scanner enthusiast what they think of the holes in the coverage of their scanners. Ask anyone who tries to receive Mobile Data Terminal (MDT) police traffic these days.
Here in the USA, the airwaves are not free for you to receive legally. I guess practical realities such as detection, enforcement, or even the old maxim of radio ("never say anything on the radio you wouldn't want the whole world to hear") are lost on our legislatures. This is where ignorant "feel good" legistlation will get you. I don't know whether we should laugh or cry in the face this kind of stupidity.
AOPA (Aircraft Owners and Pilot's Association, for you ground pounders) Pilot Magazine did an "aircraft review" article on the Shuttle orbiter a few years back. It described in great detail what it's like to "fly" the shuttle from orbit to earth.
The article writer "hand flew" the simulator from orbit to earth. It's not as bad as you might think. Anyone trained to fly an ILS approach (even a private pilot like me) would have very little difficulty with this. On the other hand, if you've never flown an ILS approach in real gooey weather, I can see why one might think this is "extremely difficult."
Anyhow, that's why astronauts train. Yes, if the autopilot is available, it's worth using; but it's not nearly as difficult to fly the re-entry profile as you make it out to be.
Congratulations, you have just proven your complete nerdiness. I bow to your massive mental capacity.
If people didn't evaluate ideas based upon the appearance of the person delivering them, then why do so many TV News anchors dress for the camera?
In a perfect world we would all think, we would all be considerate, and we would all ignore first impressions. Clearly that rarely happens in government. Think of it as respect for the institutions of our society dress for the occasion.
We aren't going to be able to settle this disagreement. We are arguing the difference between legality and pragmatism.
You want to get technical? France is probably correct. The rest of the world ought to wait for Saddam to attack first. However, anyone who can't see what Saddam is trying to do is being ridiculously naive. They are also have very little regard for human life.
In the end, what matters more? That we have international law to justify the deaths of tens of thousands --maybe even millions? Or that we attempt decapitation of a demonstrated despotic leadership?
No, this is not about law. This is about a pre-emptive strike. It would have been nice to have a clearer case such that even Russia, Germany, China, and France could have not weasled out of responding to it. Sadly, by the time this case could be made, someone would be burying far too many dead.
The principles of a law abiding nation are interesting, but incomplete. Sometimes you just have to look, think, and act. We can argue the law after Saddam is no longer a threat, and I might even agree with you. May we all have such luxury...
In the other hand, if the war ends, was "easy" and without a lot of lost lives, and Bush feels sucessful and invincible, what will be next? North Korea? the rest of the arab countries? China? France?
I believe you have just voiced the fear that underlies much of the international opposition to this war.
That's the kind of reasoning that ignorantly applied moral relativism will take you to. The difference between Saddam and the others is as follows:
1. He has a recent and personal track record of using Weapons of Mass Destruction. North Korea doesn't.
2. He has not only threatened other countries in the Middle East, he has invaded them. Twice.
3. After twelve fruitless years of attempting to get him to disarm peacefully, the UN has relatively little to show for its effort.
4. He was rebuilding an arsenal of offensive weaponry.
5. He has established substantial ties to the Palestininan terrorist causes.
Now, I admit, he probably wasn't an immediate danger to the US. But he wasn't all that far from the goal. Were we to wait for him to attack on his terms, as past experience suggests he would do, or do we preempt him and attack on our terms?
In the long run, the latter is the choice which will probably be least destructive. If we had waited for him to attack, we wouldn't be able to respond with this much accuracy and finesse. Instead, we'd be looking at our arsenals of ICBMs, not cruise missiles, aircraft, armor and troops.
The other security council nations were prepared to wait. I think it was partly because they didn't think they'd be in Saddam's crosshairs, and partly because they wouldn't mind seeing the US foreign policy and influence pushed back.
Another reason I think the other security council members objected to this course of action is because they have probably been selling all sorts of interesting things to Saddam and they don't really want the rest of the world to find out what it was. In truth, I'm sure even the US and UK have sold all sorts of interesting things to this regime too. The difference is that hopefully our two countries stopped this sort of trade after 1991. The others probably didn't.
I hope "Shock & Awe" works as planned. I had hoped that the initial decapitation was 100% successful, but clearly the armed forces wouldn't have moved ahead with S&A if it had been. My condolences to the Iraqi people. I hope the damage to life and property is minimal, and we can all get this over with shortly so we can all breath easier.
The H1-B visa regulations are quite clear that importing fresh graduates in a field where experienced help is available domestially was not what they were intended for.
Look at it another way: The Indian Government pours lots of tax money and brain trust in to IIT and subsidizes tuition so that almost anyone can afford to go --and a very sizable fraction of these fresh faced graduates just leave the country, never to return.
I'm not saying these graduates have no right to go; however, the debt they owe to Indian society is not small. I'm surprised the Government of India has done so little to the financial backing of the student tuition to stem the tide.
National origin seems to have zero impact on one's skills.
Quite true --however:
The USA has been a vacuum cleaner for technically capable people around the world. If someone manages to get that all important H1B visa, it's because they're probably from the top 0.1% of the pool available.
So, yes, I'm sure India has plenty of idiots to go around just as we in the US do. We're merely using our economic power to skim the cream of the crop and bring them here.
Is that wrong? I think so. If I were living in India, I wouldn't be too happy about all those IIT graduates heading out of the country. It deprives the Indian Society of the benefit of their most capable people and it drives otherwise capable workers of out a job here in the US.
If only lawyers could become the target of H1-B visas. Then this whole problem would disappear overnight...
Creationism is a Jewish/Christian belief, and it doesn't rule out evolution.
...then you must be reading some very different stuff than what I've seen. Creationism presumes that the bible is a source of physical knowledge. Scientists aren't supposed to make such assumptions.
And another thing: Creationism has nothing to do with Judiasm whatsoever. Jews take a highly alegorical view of the Hebrew Bible. Whether or not the physical things in it really happened is irrelevant. The important thing to them are the social truths. Creationism is irrelevant to Jewish thought.
Creationism was made up by biblical literalists. There are some who believe that the bible must not be interpreted in any way, and that it is literally true in every detail. Unfortunately, this point of view is often focused on just one translation of the bible, while glossing over details such as mysterious idioms or words which appear in just one context for which the actual definition is lost in time. Yes, even those who read the original Old Hebrew and Greek biblical texts have questions as to what it actually says.
So those who advocate Creationism as a serious field of science have a far bigger mess under the rug to answer than most scientists who discount it.
Y'know, your reading comprehension would improve dramatically if you'd concentrate on more than just a handful of adjectives.
...a directed and focused staff is only as good as the lens from which it shines. I believe it is better to stay out of the way, let them learn and do for themselves, and only surface when it is time to tell others to leave them alone. This means if you give them the proper tools and skills, they will work the rest out on their own and be all the better for it. They won't need/expect a nod from you each time they lick a stamp.
I don't know how you got that from what I wrote. I didn't suggest that hands off management was bad, I didn't suggest it was good. It's a tool --just like so many that you'll find in a good manager's bag of motivational tools. However, good managers of technical programs don't bother blowing smoke at their employees. Much of the managerese jargon is designed to do just that. Good managers don't use it on their employees and if they use it to communicate with their bosses, they'd better be very careful that both sides mean the same thing.
I envision managerese jargon as one of those secret decoder ring things. The folks in the country club make this stuff up to stay ahead of the crowd. Those who use yesterday's jargon words are looked upon as out of date goobers who need the assistance of the latest management consulting staff. Naturally, the nice fellas in the country club would be happy to oblige for a price.
As for what management style you use, well, that depends on what kind of person the manager is, and what sorts of things motivate the employees. I have nothing whatsoever to say in that regard. Every situation is different. Those who think that one style of management is the one true method are deluding themselves.
It's strange that IT people resent management's jargon so much, when IT workers spend the day talking about "gentoo" and "linux" and "emacs" and "fdisk" and many, many other words which don't even exist in English. What is it, resentment that there is another group of people with a private language they use amongst themselves? Every group has their own dialect, just listen to doctors or lawyers or auto mechanics talking amongst themselves.
No doubt, you have your finger on the motive for such awful business jargon. The difference between business jargon and other jargon is that legal, technical, medical jargon is usually the result of new concepts or new things requiring new names and verbs.
But business is still business and it's still a matter of leading and managing people, just as it was thousands of years ago.
There is a percieved need among business folk, particularly marketing, to bamboozle the people they're talking to. The hope is that the verbal prowess of the speaker will stun a customer or employee in to meek acceptance. It may work among those with a poorer understanding of language. But for those of us with a decent education and even a meagre experience, this will almost certainly backfire.
This is the arrogance in management. To think that your staff or customers can't see through a transparent attempt at posturing is ignorant and demeaning. When I hear this sort of talk, I ignore it. This is posturing. One doesn't lead by posture. One leads by directing and focussing staff.
These are the PHBs who make so much fodder for Scott Adams. I'm amazed that nobody else has managed to capitalize on this foolishness as well as he has.
Cost of doing nothing if the greens are right: environmental disaster. Cost if they are wrong: zero.
It's a value call, true. It's a trade off. But what you call a zero cost is not. There is a strong financial inertia toward investment in areas that don't contribute to the bottom line mission of a company. Why else would an administration which caters to big business work against it?
Not only is this cost substantial; it could, and historically it has, bankrupt domestic industries. Look at steel production for an example. Asian countries have fewer environmental controls on such industry and they are able to sustain profits where North American industries could not. Refineries are moving to other countries. Logging is moving to other countries.
In the end, what happened? These industries were pushed offshore to places where they can continue raping the land even more than they would have had they stayed in North America.
That's not ecologically sound, it's just another cry of NIMBY in disguise. It also costs jobs for the econonomies who try stunts like this.
One fact should be abundantly clear: Those who attempt to model the weather for long term forecasting are reluctant to make prognostications because they know how fraught with error their models can be.
We know the earth's Carbon Dioxide level has been climbing for years. We also know that there have been ice ages and tropical periods all throughout geological history. What we can't say for certain is just how much of the Carbon Dioxide we measure is the result of world wide industry and how much is natural. Further, we aren't sure what the effect of the increased Carbon Dioxide will be. The question is not that simple (for example, what will the carbon dioxide distribution be across the earth) and the answers are even more difficult.
The issue is whether we know enough to make a decision or not. Personally, I don't think we do. To me, this is not so much an issue of profit or loss. It's a question of "do we know enough to act effectively?"
Another perspective: The Kyoto accord is widely seen as a joke. It's too little to have any effect one way or the other on the environment. Yet, that very accord could easily run the US economy in to the ground.
There must be a better way to solve this problem. We haven't found it yet. The reason is because there are so many chicken little characters seeking the limelight that honest researchers with honest questions are often left on the sidelines.
A healthy argument is a step in the right direction toward pushing the doom sayers aside and searching for real, workable answers.
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Many aircraft designs do. But instead of dimples, they look like short bits of sheet metal sticking up from the wing. They're called Vortex Generators, abbreviated VG.
VGs are designed to reduce the turbulence associated with the boundary layer. They can improve take-off performance, engine out flight performance on multi-engine aircraft, and they can improve control effectiveness and/or reduce landing speeds. I've never heard of VGs actually improving cruise speed in any measurable way.
As for improved efficiency after the aircraft had been dented, I doubt it. Modern aircraft wings are very carefully designed to operate well over a wide range of flight conditions.
Clearly this pilot ought to be thanking his lucky stars that the wings of his aircraft were designed to withstand this kind of abuse. Given what I've read about the (Sc)airbus rudder certification procedures, he ought to be very thankful that the aircraft held together at all.
If I were that pilot, I'd book attendence to one of Dave Gwinn's courses on how to read onboard weather radar. Clearly he missed something.
The facts are very simple. Allowing patents on business processes was a stupid idea. The only beneficiaries are the folks who can file a submarine patent, watch someone else think of it too, and then after they've made the effort to develop the idea, sue them.
The $35M verdict is probably peanuts for EBay, but that doesn't lessen the wrongfulness. This is how you kill inventiveness and creativity: By allowing leeches such as this to win.
It's not because there should be the one true standard of everything, but that there should be a purpose behind the standard dictating the goals. Some may be more efficient, some may have been easier to implement, some may have been selected for interoperability. These goals often intersect, but not always.
You might as well ask your grocery store to supply just one do-it-all fruit.
"Maybe I'll attract a Nerd-Grrrl..." he thinks.
Gets rolled by two ton nerd high on too many twinkies.
ZAAAZZ!
Fat nerd dies of heart attack. Kid gets hauled off to jail for manslaughter --oh and his Powerbook is toast. I guess we won't see many of the
Actually, even in the near field pattern, a fifteen foot dish would not do a damned thing to your little sister's hamster. It would be well within ANSI exposure limits even at one watt.
I know this because I had to evaluate a similar situation were some roofers were working in front of an industrial communications microwave dish many years ago. Naturally they were paranoid after seeing so many sci-fi movies with great big dishes beaming death rays.
Still, I was able to show that we were getting close to the galactic noise level for near field exposure (our dish was an eight foot diameter with 10 mW on 6 GHz). Nevertheless the poobahs put their heads together and some ignorant dufus allowed these roofers to insert a clause in thir contract that we would power off the transmitter for this dish while they worked in front of it.
So we shut off the link. Down went the facility PBX trunks. Down went our two way radio communications, down went local police and fire receiver systems, down went some transmitter links for the county police. And the roofers went to work. While they were working, we went upstairs and pulled the supervisor aside.
"See that dish on that water tower over there?" I asked. "That's the other end of this microwave link. You could stand in front of this dish for your entire life and die of boredom before it did anything to you. Well, we turned off the transmitter at this end because you idiots somehow got our company to agree that not having police, fire, telephone and telemetry data is safer than exposure to this dish. But the other end of this link is still beaming microwaves at you. You didn't ask us to turn it off, so we didn't. I hope you're happy. "
Modern piston, turbo-jet, and turbo-fan engines aren't efficient compared to a fuel cell. What they have to offer is high power to weight ratio. Remember, for every weight unit of fuel they burn, they suck in as much as fifteen times that weight in air. What they're really burning is not the Jet-A or Avgas, it's air. That's a hell of a lot of weight they don't have to carry.
Now, fast forward to fuel cells. Yes, their efficiency can be quite high --but they have to carry all their propellant, not just 1/15 of it. Unless someone figures out how to engineer some kind of fuel cell which uses air as a reactant, I just don't see how such a thing will be practical.
Here's something you need to consider. Electrically, HERF is not that different than a Lightning Strike. Most recently certified aircraft are supposedly tested against lightning. Every year several hundred airliners are struck by lighting. It happens more often than most people realize. And in most cases, it's a non-event.
As for smaller aircraft, it has to be one hell of a HERF to do anything to an AvGas burning piston engined airplane. Yes, they use magnetos. Not just one, but two independent magnetos each with completely seperate plugs in the same cylinder. Anything which could trash two sets of magnetos would also have to be enough to cook the pilot. Once again, you could trash the avionics in most small aircraft, and they'd keep on running.
As further proof that this is not the threat it is made out to be, I've been through flight training exercises where I was asked to shut off the master switch for all electrically operated gear while enroute on instruments at night (wearing foggles so that I could not see outside). I still had all the vacuum powered gyro instruments and my trusty pocket flashlight which I clipped in to my headset so that I could see what the AI (attitude indicator) and HI (gyroscopic heading indicator) looked like.
Truthfully, pilots have more to fear from a laser attack at night than they do from a HERF gun.
If Usenet weren't relevant and useful few would make so much effort to reproduce it in other forms, such as e-mail lists or Slashdot.
Are there flaws in NNTP? I think it could be improved with some form of authentication to help guarantee that the source address of a post can't be forged.
However, the beauty of Usenet is that anyone can post there. Yes, that's also the flaw.
The problem is that we're all seeking quality answers and interesting discussions, but nobody can agree on just what we need to do to achieve that result. Even if there were no off-topic posts and everyone behaved like ladies and gentlemen, there would inevitably be people who want to read more basic information and people who want to read more advanced techniques.
Not having to rely on people to set the agenda is what makes Usenet so engaging to me. It's fast, it's a big free-for-all, and yes, there's lots of nonsense and wrong information. The best solution is to do what most people are simply too lazy to bother with: build a healthy kill-file and a substantial watch list. One person's troll is another person's jester.
I have grown used to rude behavior on the Internet. Anonymity can lead to this sort of thing. However, the same anonymity is what enables many to speak what's on their mind. While this can result in a very low signal to noise ratio, it also results in very candid experiences and ideas.
It's worth the effort to find those ideas and ferret them out of the background noise. Nobody can do that for you. That's what is so great about Usenet.
In my arrogant and well informed opinion as both an electrical engineer and as an instrument rated private pilot, you need a reality check.
Modern aviation is not really so modern. Most aircraft flying today are from designs decades old. Avionics technology mostly comes from the 1950s and 1960s. It didn't take spread spectrum signalling in to account because it was mostly unknown back then.
These days, a precision instrument landing takes place with a system which depends on paired VHF and UHF channels using an AM signal to let the avionics know whether to go to the right/left or up/down. It's quite precise. It will place you at a window of airspace sometimes only 100' high +/- a few feet vertically and +/- about ten feet horizontally.
These systems cost in excess of $1M per runway to implement. It has been ossified in place around the world thanks to a bunch of international agreements based on this technology. Coordinating a new system for implementation among a world-wide forum of countries is damn near impossible. As long as this scheme works, it will be very hard to replace.
Further, aircraft electronics have to be very carefully hardened against things you would never consider in the rest of the world. For example, it has to withstand a lightning strike. Several hundred aircraft are struck by lightning every year. Thanks to this kind of certification such strikes are mostly a non-event. It also has to withstand temperature extremes that even automotive electronics might have trouble with.
Thus the certification process is long and difficult, the production quantities are relatively small, and the cost is hideous. The King KX-155 radios in my aircraft cost $2500 each to replace (with reconditioned radios) several years ago.
And then there are those who say "I'll use it and if it gives the pilot trouble, I'll just turn it off." The problem is that the only way the pilots will figure out that you're doing something to the navigation system is to figure out which navigation system is being affected. That's not an easy thing to do. Then, they have to figure out where the source of interference is coming from. Then they have to somehow explain to the cabin crew what to look for and how to turn it off. Meanwhile, the workload in the flight deck goes way up.
The only solution that will allow you the freedom to use your PDA is to put you guys in to a faraday shield. To do that you'd have to rip out the interior of the aircraft and install a metal screen around the entire cabin. Nobody in their right mind is going to do that unless new government regulations come out mandating this sort of thing.
In any case, very few aircraft cabins are deliberately designed to be isolated in this manner. If you want to know more, start here and keep reading.
I admit, the probability that something will go wrong is in fact quite small. But if things do go wrong, you and every other person on that aircraft could easily become the next big smoking crater somewhere. Are you willing to risk not only your life, but everyone else's life on board the airliner, just to get a few more minutes with your PDA?
I didn't think so.
2) What "poisons" this fuel cell? Will it survive a bit of water?
3) What are the by-products of power generation? Can it be used to store energy too?
4) How many watts per kg or liter?
Sheesh. And it's only been tested for a few months. I'll bet there are at least a few unknowns yet to be discovered. Nontheless, the concept is interesting. The question is whether this can become a practical commercial device. You can't even begin to guess with shoddy reporting like this...
The urban legend was that the infamous John Dillinger's penis was abnormally large. So large, in fact, that when raped women, his penis would kill them due to internal hemoraging. This penis was supposedly removed postumously and sent to (A) The Smithsonian or (B) The Walter Reed Army Medical Museum.
Naturally, people would approach the information desk every now and then wanting to know where it was.
Note that the date on this post is April 2. The urban legend exists; and yes, I was personally asked about it by a visitor (I could hardly contain my laughter). The information desk manual had all the appropriate disclaimers catagorized under D for Dillinger.
I can say with good experience that the PE ceritificate doesn't prove much. I've seen very smart people with the PE and I've also met an equal number of idiots with the PE. If the PE is a filter, then it needs a great deal of improvement.
I took the EIT class. It was almost all theory. I had thought the EIT and PE were supposed to prove some sort of competence as an engineer; but when I saw what the tests really were, I lost interest. The point of certifying engineers is to show that they know how to translate theory in to reality. The PE and the EIT tests can't possibly do that.
I don't know of any good tests which can prove competence in such things. Only an appreticeship with someone who knows the field can be an effective filter against such mediocrity. Doctors and aircraft pilots are certified this way. As a private pilot, I'll point out that even this method is a lot less effective than I'd like.
No, what really keeps a building up are habits and Engineering Standards. Most engineers I've known are smart enough to use similar approaches. But there is one thing that separates the kids from the adults. The standards are guidelines, not dictat. When you pull these mediocre "standards at all costs" engineers out of their element and drop a problem even slightly outside their normal experience in front of them, they're often at a loss to deal with it.
I should mention the kind of engineering I do is often post mortem. When something doesn't work and it seems like it should have, I get called in. I'm one of the guys in our company who gets to clean up after the people who don't know what they're doing.
So, is writing software or network management the same as engineering? Well, yes and no.
Networks should involve engineering backgrounds. However, few people I see in charge of networking actually understand the data sources, sinks, and typical traffic patterns on their networks. If someone actually does this, then he or she deserves the title of Engineer. The typical fresh faced MSCE graduate doesn't qualify.
In software, I think better theories and tighter standards are needed at the application and user interface level. The Open Source projects help a great deal because they offer several competing examples of how something can be done. I hope that eventually these various approaches can be catagorized, and the trade-offs of these approaches become well known, much as various sort and search algorithms have been documented.
However, because the practice of software is so immature, being more art than science, it's not ready to be called engineering in my opinion. It will get there some day, but it's not there yet. Sorry, folks.
Those of you who are a bit older may remember the likes of SuperTV which used to broadcast an encoded signal on the air. Many built receive decoders. SuperTV didn't last long. HBO used to broadcast on the Multi-Point Distribution service on 2154 MHz. Anyone remember those "stopsign" boards and coffee can antennas? Those were illegal too under a twisted interpretation the FCC made using certain clauses of the original Radio Secrecy section of the Communications Act of 1934.
No, the FCC is not your friend. The airwaves are not free in the USA. Ask any Scanner enthusiast what they think of the holes in the coverage of their scanners. Ask anyone who tries to receive Mobile Data Terminal (MDT) police traffic these days.
Here in the USA, the airwaves are not free for you to receive legally. I guess practical realities such as detection, enforcement, or even the old maxim of radio ("never say anything on the radio you wouldn't want the whole world to hear") are lost on our legislatures. This is where ignorant "feel good" legistlation will get you. I don't know whether we should laugh or cry in the face this kind of stupidity.
AOPA (Aircraft Owners and Pilot's Association, for you ground pounders) Pilot Magazine did an "aircraft review" article on the Shuttle orbiter a few years back. It described in great detail what it's like to "fly" the shuttle from orbit to earth.
The article writer "hand flew" the simulator from orbit to earth. It's not as bad as you might think. Anyone trained to fly an ILS approach (even a private pilot like me) would have very little difficulty with this. On the other hand, if you've never flown an ILS approach in real gooey weather, I can see why one might think this is "extremely difficult."
Anyhow, that's why astronauts train. Yes, if the autopilot is available, it's worth using; but it's not nearly as difficult to fly the re-entry profile as you make it out to be.
If people didn't evaluate ideas based upon the appearance of the person delivering them, then why do so many TV News anchors dress for the camera?
In a perfect world we would all think, we would all be considerate, and we would all ignore first impressions. Clearly that rarely happens in government. Think of it as respect for the institutions of our society dress for the occasion.
You want to get technical? France is probably correct. The rest of the world ought to wait for Saddam to attack first. However, anyone who can't see what Saddam is trying to do is being ridiculously naive. They are also have very little regard for human life.
In the end, what matters more? That we have international law to justify the deaths of tens of thousands --maybe even millions? Or that we attempt decapitation of a demonstrated despotic leadership?
No, this is not about law. This is about a pre-emptive strike. It would have been nice to have a clearer case such that even Russia, Germany, China, and France could have not weasled out of responding to it. Sadly, by the time this case could be made, someone would be burying far too many dead.
The principles of a law abiding nation are interesting, but incomplete. Sometimes you just have to look, think, and act. We can argue the law after Saddam is no longer a threat, and I might even agree with you. May we all have such luxury...
That's the kind of reasoning that ignorantly applied moral relativism will take you to. The difference between Saddam and the others is as follows:
1. He has a recent and personal track record of using Weapons of Mass Destruction. North Korea doesn't.
2. He has not only threatened other countries in the Middle East, he has invaded them. Twice.
3. After twelve fruitless years of attempting to get him to disarm peacefully, the UN has relatively little to show for its effort.
4. He was rebuilding an arsenal of offensive weaponry.
5. He has established substantial ties to the Palestininan terrorist causes.
Now, I admit, he probably wasn't an immediate danger to the US. But he wasn't all that far from the goal. Were we to wait for him to attack on his terms, as past experience suggests he would do, or do we preempt him and attack on our terms?
In the long run, the latter is the choice which will probably be least destructive. If we had waited for him to attack, we wouldn't be able to respond with this much accuracy and finesse. Instead, we'd be looking at our arsenals of ICBMs, not cruise missiles, aircraft, armor and troops.
The other security council nations were prepared to wait. I think it was partly because they didn't think they'd be in Saddam's crosshairs, and partly because they wouldn't mind seeing the US foreign policy and influence pushed back.
Another reason I think the other security council members objected to this course of action is because they have probably been selling all sorts of interesting things to Saddam and they don't really want the rest of the world to find out what it was. In truth, I'm sure even the US and UK have sold all sorts of interesting things to this regime too. The difference is that hopefully our two countries stopped this sort of trade after 1991. The others probably didn't.
I hope "Shock & Awe" works as planned. I had hoped that the initial decapitation was 100% successful, but clearly the armed forces wouldn't have moved ahead with S&A if it had been. My condolences to the Iraqi people. I hope the damage to life and property is minimal, and we can all get this over with shortly so we can all breath easier.
Look at it another way: The Indian Government pours lots of tax money and brain trust in to IIT and subsidizes tuition so that almost anyone can afford to go --and a very sizable fraction of these fresh faced graduates just leave the country, never to return.
I'm not saying these graduates have no right to go; however, the debt they owe to Indian society is not small. I'm surprised the Government of India has done so little to the financial backing of the student tuition to stem the tide.
Quite true --however:
The USA has been a vacuum cleaner for technically capable people around the world. If someone manages to get that all important H1B visa, it's because they're probably from the top 0.1% of the pool available.
So, yes, I'm sure India has plenty of idiots to go around just as we in the US do. We're merely using our economic power to skim the cream of the crop and bring them here.
Is that wrong? I think so. If I were living in India, I wouldn't be too happy about all those IIT graduates heading out of the country. It deprives the Indian Society of the benefit of their most capable people and it drives otherwise capable workers of out a job here in the US.
If only lawyers could become the target of H1-B visas. Then this whole problem would disappear overnight...
And another thing: Creationism has nothing to do with Judiasm whatsoever. Jews take a highly alegorical view of the Hebrew Bible. Whether or not the physical things in it really happened is irrelevant. The important thing to them are the social truths. Creationism is irrelevant to Jewish thought.
Creationism was made up by biblical literalists. There are some who believe that the bible must not be interpreted in any way, and that it is literally true in every detail. Unfortunately, this point of view is often focused on just one translation of the bible, while glossing over details such as mysterious idioms or words which appear in just one context for which the actual definition is lost in time. Yes, even those who read the original Old Hebrew and Greek biblical texts have questions as to what it actually says.
So those who advocate Creationism as a serious field of science have a far bigger mess under the rug to answer than most scientists who discount it.
I don't know how you got that from what I wrote. I didn't suggest that hands off management was bad, I didn't suggest it was good. It's a tool --just like so many that you'll find in a good manager's bag of motivational tools. However, good managers of technical programs don't bother blowing smoke at their employees. Much of the managerese jargon is designed to do just that. Good managers don't use it on their employees and if they use it to communicate with their bosses, they'd better be very careful that both sides mean the same thing.
I envision managerese jargon as one of those secret decoder ring things. The folks in the country club make this stuff up to stay ahead of the crowd. Those who use yesterday's jargon words are looked upon as out of date goobers who need the assistance of the latest management consulting staff. Naturally, the nice fellas in the country club would be happy to oblige for a price.
As for what management style you use, well, that depends on what kind of person the manager is, and what sorts of things motivate the employees. I have nothing whatsoever to say in that regard. Every situation is different. Those who think that one style of management is the one true method are deluding themselves.
No doubt, you have your finger on the motive for such awful business jargon. The difference between business jargon and other jargon is that legal, technical, medical jargon is usually the result of new concepts or new things requiring new names and verbs.
But business is still business and it's still a matter of leading and managing people, just as it was thousands of years ago.
There is a percieved need among business folk, particularly marketing, to bamboozle the people they're talking to. The hope is that the verbal prowess of the speaker will stun a customer or employee in to meek acceptance. It may work among those with a poorer understanding of language. But for those of us with a decent education and even a meagre experience, this will almost certainly backfire.
This is the arrogance in management. To think that your staff or customers can't see through a transparent attempt at posturing is ignorant and demeaning. When I hear this sort of talk, I ignore it. This is posturing. One doesn't lead by posture. One leads by directing and focussing staff.
These are the PHBs who make so much fodder for Scott Adams. I'm amazed that nobody else has managed to capitalize on this foolishness as well as he has.
It's a value call, true. It's a trade off. But what you call a zero cost is not. There is a strong financial inertia toward investment in areas that don't contribute to the bottom line mission of a company. Why else would an administration which caters to big business work against it?
Not only is this cost substantial; it could, and historically it has, bankrupt domestic industries. Look at steel production for an example. Asian countries have fewer environmental controls on such industry and they are able to sustain profits where North American industries could not. Refineries are moving to other countries. Logging is moving to other countries.
In the end, what happened? These industries were pushed offshore to places where they can continue raping the land even more than they would have had they stayed in North America.
That's not ecologically sound, it's just another cry of NIMBY in disguise. It also costs jobs for the econonomies who try stunts like this.
One fact should be abundantly clear: Those who attempt to model the weather for long term forecasting are reluctant to make prognostications because they know how fraught with error their models can be.
We know the earth's Carbon Dioxide level has been climbing for years. We also know that there have been ice ages and tropical periods all throughout geological history. What we can't say for certain is just how much of the Carbon Dioxide we measure is the result of world wide industry and how much is natural. Further, we aren't sure what the effect of the increased Carbon Dioxide will be. The question is not that simple (for example, what will the carbon dioxide distribution be across the earth) and the answers are even more difficult.
The issue is whether we know enough to make a decision or not. Personally, I don't think we do. To me, this is not so much an issue of profit or loss. It's a question of "do we know enough to act effectively?"
Another perspective: The Kyoto accord is widely seen as a joke. It's too little to have any effect one way or the other on the environment. Yet, that very accord could easily run the US economy in to the ground.
There must be a better way to solve this problem. We haven't found it yet. The reason is because there are so many chicken little characters seeking the limelight that honest researchers with honest questions are often left on the sidelines.
A healthy argument is a step in the right direction toward pushing the doom sayers aside and searching for real, workable answers.