I took a course in Russian (the language) at a mid-sized Canadian University in 1989. The professor described a visit by a bunch of Soviet academics a few years before (accompanied by political handlers of course). As he drove them around the city to show them the sights, the river, etc etc, they absolutely refused to believe that their visit and the car ride wasn't all being staged. They just couldn't believe that *every* single Canadian citizen had their own car.
As they drove along paved four lane street in the city core, full of rush-hour cars, in some little out-of-the-way Canadian city (200,000 people, Canadian Prairies), they were absolutely *CERTAIN* that the Canadian Government had gotten together a few hundred cars and were having them all circle around the block to put on a show for them. He had to repeatedly assure them that no, this was just like any other day in any modern Western city.
Re:Good point, but in most cases...
on
Kazaa Usability Study
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· Score: 3, Informative
Kazaa's "shared folder selector" has a failure mode, a bug, where you select a deep level subdirectory and click "ok" or "apply" and it actually shares the entire hard drive. If you re-open the shared-folder gui, it will show your entire drive shared.
So it's not simply a user interface usability issue. There is a known bug in the code that causes entire drives to be shared when all you are doing is selecting a specific subdirectory.
Not only in this movie an insult to Americans who died during WWII, it is also an insult to the *British* who actually captured the Enigma machine and cracked the code: ...From Roger Ebert's review:
I *just* watched U-571 for the first time 3 hours ago.
a) It wasn't a bad movie. It was quite entertaining, and did not contain any glaring problems. (At least nothing like Red Plant, my god I'm 18 minutes into it and I already *hate* it, glad I didn't pay for it:) ) So I agree with all the people here that are roasting our./ reviewer. I'm not sure what kind of dope he's on.
b) The end of the movie explicitly listed the factual historical record, including the credit to the Bulldog and all the British incidents that took place before the 1944 American one.
I thought that the Tenerife crash was caused by the arrogant KLM pilot (van Zanten) that refused to listen to his cowed co-pilot?
I thought that this was the source of a lot of modern intern-crew relationship and discipline training, brought in and implemented by airlines to prevent another such disaster from happening due to screwed up human-interactions.
I've *never* heard of this radio glitch before. Are you sure it wasn't the "cover story" used by the Dutch to try and divert the blame?
Or is it some idiotic side-story that the author is trying to pump in this story? It certainly seems so. Just because the radio systems didn't allow for simultaneous communications between both aircraft isn't "the reason" that the disaster happened. CLEARLY everyone would *know* what their communications systems were and were not capable of.
I declare this story to be misguided. The radio was not the reason for the crash. It might have been a contributing factor. But not responsible.
This is a common problem with techies (and I am a techie). Believing that "just one more gadget" will make everything all right, or that "gadgest" are the center of the universe.
Sure, if van Zanten hadn't initiated his takeoff roll without permission, nobody would have died that day. But since when have we left our fate entirely in the hands of one person's judgment?
Every single day. The gadgets are only there to help them. They can not prevent them from acting like arrogant SOBs, or ignoring their systems. That's why with all systems come procedures. And with all procedures come EVALUATION AND MONITORING of the HUMANs who are responsible for following and acting according to procedures.
All that being said, they merely chose a bad case to use as an example to get the FAA/airlines to adopt a worthwhile smart piece of technology. It is well known that the FAA is basically inept and incapable of protecting human lives, because they are torn apart by the conflict of interest in "promoting air travel and commerce" as well as enacting rules as recommended by the highly independent NTSC.
Yup, felt it strongly in Toronto. I woke up to find my air mattress sliding around, and looked up to see the hanging light swaying much more than normal. It came in a couple of waves 5-10 seconds apart if I'm not mistaken.
However I'm on the 30th floor of an apartment building, and the building is always swaying a bit, the machine room right above me puts some funky resonances into the building every so often.
So I concluded that there was simply a 70 mile per hour wind gust outside, and that my air-mattress was perfectly resonant with it and thus shaking more than normal. I fell right back to sleep. I only gave the thought of an EarthQuake a few seconds consideration, and until I saw these posts here, didn't even realize it was one!!!
Reminds me of the time I was in SF and a 5.x happened. I was in the shower/bathtub, and I heard a rumbling from above. I simply thought it was some big football player or fat guy running around like a madman in the apartment above me!! LOL. It wasn't until later in the day that I found out it was an earthquake.
Maybe next time I'll be able to recognize it for what it is.
This article is the equivalent of Bell Labs EXECUTIVES and CEO's claiming that they were in the process of single handedly pulling the transistor out of their a**es, before the transistor had even been created yet.
It ignores the 20-30 years of physics and engineering physics that came before it, it ignores the thousands of people and hundreds of groups who have been working at the dozens of different approaches to this EXACT problem, and it ignores the engineers who actually came up with the designs for the devices they are intending to use, and the related background between all of these.
I should know. I spent four years doing a degree on one possible approach to creating the exact components they claim they are working on. I worked with InGaAs/InGaAsP/InP Quantum Well structures and one possible method of creating a fundamental process to modify such a structure into the types of devices they are thinking about. We were thinking ahead to the exact thing that they are thinking of.
And we ourselves were basing our work on 10-15 years of other people's work. The first people who came up with the possibility of using non-silicon semiconductors was 3+ decades ago, and of creating fully integrated InP/etc based all optical ciruits is about 20-30 years old.
Abit boards DO NOT HAVE A CONSUMER WARRANTY! Well they do, but it's solely done through your retailer, and they'll only offer the retailer 1 year. You're 100 percent at the mercy of the retailer. And what fraction of retailers do you trust for no-hassles service?
When scientists plot the position of the magnetic north pole on a map, they plot its average position. Not only does the pole change its location over years and decades, but it also travels in a roughly elliptical path each day. This daily wandering can take the pole up to 80 km from where it is plotted!
Letters from doctors and airlines mean nothing. Their pieces of paper that are easily forged.
No rational security guard or "manager" doing their jobs would have the knowledge or authority to make the kind of exceptions to security procedures that this guy expected.
I am highly concerned he was let through Pearson security so easily. Ripped from his skin? Disoriented and couldn't walk straight? Half a million dollars of equipment? Whatever. Cyborg? If it is that bad, he should not have been flying, not without a Transport Canada ruling, like are needed for other highly exceptional circumstances.
Give me a break. The "article" as well as the Slashdot lead in all sound *HIGHLY* one sided.
I give this side of the story a credibility rating of 2 out of 10, and the possibility that Professor Steve Mann is a pompous jackass a 7 out of 10. That the people in St. Johns did their job as we've requested them to do? 8 out of 10, losing points for putting his video glasses in with the baggage and not keeping track of his possessions.
Re:so, you people want to build a gun eh?
on
Homemade Gauss Gun
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· Score: 1
No, I've just done the math, and it is 66 thousand G.
But you *are* correct that despite this great acceleration, it's not out-of-line with standard projectile weapons.
> I don't think that Morpheus is telling the whole story.
No shit!! The entire explanation seems a bit wierd to me, a Software Engineer. It feels like a know-nothing higher up threw together three or four buzzwords to come up with some idiotic story.
Look at this quote:
According to the CEO's note, the hack involves changing registry settings on the client's machine (ouch) and rerouting the messages destined for their ad servers.
He could just be talking about individual users who were blocking their Advertisements by using their hosts file!!!!
This smells. Not that I'm complaining, it was nice while it lasted, and it was "free" as in beer. But now I've got 2-3 GB of partially downloaded files that are useless. (shagrined is the word.)
Ok, next time, lets use a "free as in freedom" network that doesn't have any centralized login. Do all the uneducated schmucks out there hear me?
No it's not! It's universally reviewed as the worst quality DVD ever made!
There's VISIBLE JITTER and "fuzzies"! It's like they played back a third generation copy that had been in the theaters for 5 years on an old projector without aligning the film, and so it "vibrated" the entire time. You can't notice it in the motion shots because it's drowned out a bit in the overall motion, but ANYTIME the action stops and you see a static scene, you can see the jitter.
Re:More lessons from Apollo 1
on
Apollo 1
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· Score: 1
Fair call Derek. I was being snippy about the door. I appologize (to whomever took offence).
As I was proofreading it at 12:30am I heard a little voice in my head saying "you're being a bit combative about that part, the new door *must* have weight more, etc etc", but I was too tired to listen to myself.
With enough heat and oxygen, most stuff will burn. And yes, they had a lot of questionable junk, stuff that wouldn't burn if they had 4-5 psi oxygen, but that would burn with 17 psi oxygen. Things like that.
Here's a neat example: An oxy-acetalene torch burns through steel slabs.
You use the regular torch to heat up a spot on the metal to just about melting, then you blast it with oxygen. Because the metal is so hot and you're giving it so much pure oxygen, it burns, which creats a *ton* more heat, which heats up the nearby metal, which then burns with the oxygen you're feeding it, etc etc.
You have to keep the oxygen jet moving at just the right speed in order to continue the reaction.
> The only part of their bodies that were burned were the exposed surfaces
> (hands, faces) under their suits they were completely unscathed.
Bull-SHIT!
And I QUOTE:
"A medical board was to determine that the astronauts died of carbon monoxide asphyxia, with thermal burns as contributing causes. The board could not say how much of the burns came after the three had died. Fire had destroyed 70% of Grissom's spacesuit, 25% of White's, and 15% of Chaffee's"
How the hell did the mindstrm's post get moderated as a Troll?? The first time I read the report I myself wondered whether they were just guessing in order to save the families (and everyone else) from wondering. Sure it's not pleasant to think about, but it's a valid thing to wonder.
It's quite well known that police and fire departments will mis-quote the cause of death in order to save a family greif. But every so often the expressions and positions of a charred corpse make it clear that the person was getting plenty of oxygen for quite some time while dying. (It is possible to get 3rd degree burns from thermal raditation alone.) Remember how long you can hold your breath?
It is theorized that if you inhale hot enough gases that the excruciating pain in your lungs will cause you to black out quickly, but we don't exactly have too much first hand knowledge of that.
Re:More lessons from Apollo 1
on
Apollo 1
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· Score: 2
Umm, from my Chemistry and Physics background, having a 20% Oxygen 80% Nitrogen atmosphere at full pressure or a 100% Oxygen atmosphere at 1/5 pressure should not change the physics and chemistry of a fire. In either case you have exactly the same number of oxygen molecules occupying the same volume. (I could be wrong, but with my MSc in Physics, I'll want to hear from someone who *really* knows, not some other schmuck like you or me with a semi-informed opinion:)
However, if you wanted to test the system at sea level and wanted to keep the system handling only Oxygen, then you'd be forced to use 100% Oxygen at full atmospheric pressure. Now *that* was a mistake.
BTW: I'm quite annoyed at all the people saying "we didn't know an oxygen atmosphere was that dangerous".
This was a standard Tombstone Technology incident. The US AirForce and others published lots of information in the preceeding 5-10 years showing just how dangerous a fire in a full oxygen atmosphere was, but *numerous* people have to die in numerous incidents (or one big/famous one) to make the awareness of the information global. Other sections of the NASA article that the slashdot article links to itself lists 6-12 references to prior publications that clearly indicated the danger of a fire in a 100% oxygen atmosphere.
And don't give me any bull about why they built the door as it was. After the fire they made a door which opened outwards in 3 seconds with as little as a half pound of force, and the door was counterweighted to hold itself open.
Now it *is* true that no-one knew how easily a fire could start in an atmosphere like that. If I remember correctly from reading a more fully detailed report, as a result of the Appolo 1 fire it was discovered that a spark, just one bloody spark, can cause a fire up to two feet away in a pure oxygen environment at atmospheric pressures. (Remember the last time you saw the sun-rays shining in through the window, and you thought to yourself, "wow, look at all that dust".)
I found some paragraphs of the NASA pages linked to in this story to be somewhat self serving and incomplete.
Annoys the hell out of me when "news" sites don't have links to relevant sources of information, or to the very places they got the "news" from. Here is the ESO page.
However here are the puppies you really want. Spectacular as a desktop.
I've always been great at analogies and explaining things to non-technical people, so I'll give this a try.
First off, I have to make you understand something. What the common person thinks of as "common sense" or "natural" is solely defined by the things they've gotten used to observing through their daily lives.
Science is NOT what we think should happen, or what makes "common sense". It is completely defined by what is observed.
Yes, this means that there are hundreds of things that young physicists encounter which *make no common sense*, but yea, there they are. The universe clearly demonstrates time after time that yes, the world works like that, which is completely counter to what you, a big huge blob of carbon and water, normally sees.
Now I'm going to draw a parallel that will hopefully bridge the gap between what you know and believe, and what the universe has taught us.
You've just jumped off a cliff on earth. You're an average human being, you have no strange artificial tools strapped to you. You have some cannonballs and rocks. Bo matter what you do, you will *not* be able to prevent falling down to the bottom. You could madly throw cannonballs and rocks downward, in an effort to use the common-sense principle of action/reaction to "thrust" yourself upwards. But it will not prevent you from falling down, merely slow you. You could have jumped upwards from the cliff, or tried running before jumping off, but either way you're going to fall to the bottom.
Why?
Because this close to the earth, on the edge of a cliff, gravity is quite simply stronger than you could ever be. And that's the way it is.
Maybe if you were a million miles away from the earth and jumping off a satelite, it'd work. You wouldn't need much thrust from a few thrown rocks to get away. But not down here.
Similarly the laws of physics (as we've observed them over a hundred years) tell us that for normal every-day matter that gets that close to a "black hole" (enourmous amount of matter all in one place), there is nothing that can be done to prevent that matter from falling in to the bottom. Even if you converted all but one atom of your mass to thrust, in any conceivable form, that last remaining atom would not be able to get out. It would only delay it's descent. The gravity has simply become *that* strong. Maybe if you were a little further away. But you're not. You're within the "event-horizon", the line which, once stepped over, there is no possibility of escape.
Even if you were a bit of light, the fastest moving, lightest thing in the universe, the gravity will drag you in. And if you're a photon of light, there's no way for you to go any faster, no bit of you that you can "cast off".
I'm in an apartment building facing North. I have a friend about 10-20 floors below me (so at minimum there are 10-20 floors worth of concrete between us, I forget exactly what floor he's on).
I have another friend in another building that is to the south-east of my building, and he's on the south side and 15 floors lower down. So that means he's probably got 1-2.5 times as much concrete in the way.
What are my odds that *any* of these protocols will connect us? Even if we're using directional antennas? And what are the RF 'radiation' hazzards for the people living between us:)
(There are no tall buildings at all to the north of our buildings, just 1-2 story residential houses.)
You are asking every single parent to review, in full, ever single game, movie, and tv show that their child comes in contact with. It's noble, it's doable (seeing as you're probably already highly interested in what you're kids are doing), but it's grossely inefficient.
Don't get all high and mighty on me. I'm not asking that someone do my job as a parent. I'm asking that someone make my job as a parent a bit easier, so I can cook dinner instead of watching over my son's shoulder for an hour trying to figure out if the game he's playing is too violent (and that's *after* it's been bought), or hunting down a reputable review of the damn game before he buy's it.
The whole advantage to society is organization and reducing dulication of effort. You aren't helping.
Did you noitce what the CIO wanted? Cheaper software with higher
quality. Then they MUST hold out for the vendors who take the
longest to get to market, or who have the least features.
It'll be a cold day in hell before a CIO does that.
They just don't get it. They want to eat their cake and have it too.
They won't be getting out of this quagmire for some time.
Slashdot Mirror
I took a course in Russian (the language) at a mid-sized Canadian University in 1989. The professor described a visit by a bunch of Soviet academics a few years before (accompanied by political handlers of course). As he drove them around the city to show them the sights, the river, etc etc, they absolutely refused to believe that their visit and the car ride wasn't all being staged. They just couldn't believe that *every* single Canadian citizen had their own car.
As they drove along paved four lane street in the city core, full of rush-hour cars, in some little out-of-the-way Canadian city (200,000 people, Canadian Prairies), they were absolutely *CERTAIN* that the Canadian Government had gotten together a few hundred cars and were having them all circle around the block to put on a show for them. He had to repeatedly assure them that no, this was just like any other day in any modern Western city.
Kazaa's "shared folder selector" has a failure mode, a bug, where you select a deep level subdirectory and click "ok" or "apply" and it actually shares the entire hard drive. If you re-open the shared-folder gui, it will show your entire drive shared.
So it's not simply a user interface usability issue. There is a known bug in the code that causes entire drives to be shared when all you are doing is selecting a specific subdirectory.
Not only in this movie an insult to Americans who died during WWII, it is also an insult to the *British* who actually captured the Enigma machine and cracked the code:
:) ) So I agree with all the people here that are roasting our ./ reviewer. I'm not sure what kind of dope he's on.
...From Roger Ebert's review:
I *just* watched U-571 for the first time 3 hours ago.
a) It wasn't a bad movie. It was quite entertaining, and did not contain any glaring problems. (At least nothing like Red Plant, my god I'm 18 minutes into it and I already *hate* it, glad I didn't pay for it
b) The end of the movie explicitly listed the factual historical record, including the credit to the Bulldog and all the British incidents that took place before the 1944 American one.
Ahem, NTSB, not NTSC.
I thought that the Tenerife crash was caused by the arrogant KLM pilot (van Zanten) that refused to listen to his cowed co-pilot?
I thought that this was the source of a lot of modern intern-crew relationship and discipline training, brought in and implemented by airlines to prevent another such disaster from happening due to screwed up human-interactions.
I've *never* heard of this radio glitch before. Are you sure it wasn't the "cover story" used by the Dutch to try and divert the blame?
Or is it some idiotic side-story that the author is trying to pump in this story? It certainly seems so. Just because the radio systems didn't allow for simultaneous communications between both aircraft isn't "the reason" that the disaster happened. CLEARLY everyone would *know* what their communications systems were and were not capable of.
I declare this story to be misguided. The radio was not the reason for the crash. It might have been a contributing factor. But not responsible.
This is a common problem with techies (and I am a techie). Believing that "just one more gadget" will make everything all right, or that "gadgest" are the center of the universe.
Sure, if van Zanten hadn't initiated his takeoff roll without permission, nobody would have died that day. But since when have we left our fate entirely in the hands of one person's judgment?
Every single day. The gadgets are only there to help them. They can not prevent them from acting like arrogant SOBs, or ignoring their systems. That's why with all systems come procedures. And with all procedures come EVALUATION AND MONITORING of the HUMANs who are responsible for following and acting according to procedures.
All that being said, they merely chose a bad case to use as an example to get the FAA/airlines to adopt a worthwhile smart piece of technology. It is well known that the FAA is basically inept and incapable of protecting human lives, because they are torn apart by the conflict of interest in "promoting air travel and commerce" as well as enacting rules as recommended by the highly independent NTSC.
Yup, felt it strongly in Toronto. I woke up to find my air mattress sliding around, and looked up to see the hanging light swaying much more than normal. It came in a couple of waves 5-10 seconds apart if I'm not mistaken.
However I'm on the 30th floor of an apartment building, and the building is always swaying a bit, the machine room right above me puts some funky resonances into the building every so often.
So I concluded that there was simply a 70 mile per hour wind gust outside, and that my air-mattress was perfectly resonant with it and thus shaking more than normal. I fell right back to sleep. I only gave the thought of an EarthQuake a few seconds consideration, and until I saw these posts here, didn't even realize it was one!!!
Reminds me of the time I was in SF and a 5.x happened. I was in the shower/bathtub, and I heard a rumbling from above. I simply thought it was some big football player or fat guy running around like a madman in the apartment above me!! LOL. It wasn't until later in the day that I found out it was an earthquake.
Maybe next time I'll be able to recognize it for what it is.
Absolutely.
This article is the equivalent of Bell Labs EXECUTIVES and CEO's claiming that they were in the process of single handedly pulling the transistor out of their a**es, before the transistor had even been created yet.
It ignores the 20-30 years of physics and engineering physics that came before it, it ignores the thousands of people and hundreds of groups who have been working at the dozens of different approaches to this EXACT problem, and it ignores the engineers who actually came up with the designs for the devices they are intending to use, and the related background between all of these.
I should know. I spent four years doing a degree on one possible approach to creating the exact components they claim they are working on. I worked with InGaAs/InGaAsP/InP Quantum Well structures and one possible method of creating a fundamental process to modify such a structure into the types of devices they are thinking about. We were thinking ahead to the exact thing that they are thinking of.
And we ourselves were basing our work on 10-15 years of other people's work. The first people who came up with the possibility of using non-silicon semiconductors was 3+ decades ago, and of creating fully integrated InP/etc based all optical ciruits is about 20-30 years old.
Abit boards DO NOT HAVE A CONSUMER WARRANTY! Well they do, but it's solely done through your retailer, and they'll only offer the retailer 1 year. You're 100 percent at the mercy of the retailer. And what fraction of retailers do you trust for no-hassles service?
ASUS is 3 years, and it's direct through ASUS.
Holy cow, look at this snippet:
When scientists plot the position of the magnetic north pole on a map, they plot its average position. Not only does the pole change its location over years and decades, but it also travels in a roughly elliptical path each day. This daily wandering can take the pole up to 80 km from where it is plotted!
I never knew that!
Letters from doctors and airlines mean nothing. Their pieces of paper that are easily forged.
No rational security guard or "manager" doing their jobs would have the knowledge or authority to make the kind of exceptions to security procedures that this guy expected.
I am highly concerned he was let through Pearson security so easily. Ripped from his skin? Disoriented and couldn't walk straight? Half a million dollars of equipment? Whatever. Cyborg? If it is that bad, he should not have been flying, not without a Transport Canada ruling, like are needed for other highly exceptional circumstances.
Give me a break. The "article" as well as the Slashdot lead in all sound *HIGHLY* one sided.
I give this side of the story a credibility rating of 2 out of 10, and the possibility that Professor Steve Mann is a pompous jackass a 7 out of 10. That the people in St. Johns did their job as we've requested them to do? 8 out of 10, losing points for putting his video glasses in with the baggage and not keeping track of his possessions.
No, I've just done the math, and it is 66 thousand G.
But you *are* correct that despite this great acceleration, it's not out-of-line with standard projectile weapons.
> I don't think that Morpheus is telling the whole story.
No shit!! The entire explanation seems a bit wierd to me, a Software Engineer. It feels like a know-nothing higher up threw together three or four buzzwords to come up with some idiotic story.
Look at this quote:
According to the CEO's note, the hack involves changing registry settings on the client's machine (ouch) and rerouting the messages destined for their ad servers.
He could just be talking about individual users who were blocking their Advertisements by using their hosts file!!!!
This smells. Not that I'm complaining, it was nice while it lasted, and it was "free" as in beer. But now I've got 2-3 GB of partially downloaded files that are useless. (shagrined is the word.)
Ok, next time, lets use a "free as in freedom" network that doesn't have any centralized login. Do all the uneducated schmucks out there hear me?
> The movie itself is fine
No it's not! It's universally reviewed as the worst quality DVD ever made!
There's VISIBLE JITTER and "fuzzies"! It's like they played back a third generation copy that had been in the theaters for 5 years on an old projector without aligning the film, and so it "vibrated" the entire time. You can't notice it in the motion shots because it's drowned out a bit in the overall motion, but ANYTIME the action stops and you see a static scene, you can see the jitter.
First and last DVD I ever bought.
http://www.geocities.com/payndz2/amywears.html
http://www.leela.com.ar/fanart/rpeckett.shtml
http://www.portalmix.com/futurama/downloads/leela
Awwwwwww yeahhh baby...
Fair call Derek. I was being snippy about the door. I appologize (to whomever took offence).
As I was proofreading it at 12:30am I heard a little voice in my head saying "you're being a bit combative about that part, the new door *must* have weight more, etc etc", but I was too tired to listen to myself.
Thanks for the solid info!
With enough heat and oxygen, most stuff will burn. And yes, they had a lot of questionable junk, stuff that wouldn't burn if they had 4-5 psi oxygen, but that would burn with 17 psi oxygen. Things like that.
Here's a neat example: An oxy-acetalene torch burns through steel slabs.
You use the regular torch to heat up a spot on the metal to just about melting, then you blast it with oxygen. Because the metal is so hot and you're giving it so much pure oxygen, it burns, which creats a *ton* more heat, which heats up the nearby metal, which then burns with the oxygen you're feeding it, etc etc.
You have to keep the oxygen jet moving at just the right speed in order to continue the reaction.
Here is a cool reference.
And this "thermic lance" used to burn through 6 feet of concrete, wow, I'd never seen that before!
.
> The only part of their bodies that were burned were the exposed surfaces
> (hands, faces) under their suits they were completely unscathed.
Bull-SHIT!
And I QUOTE:
"A medical board was to determine that the astronauts died of carbon monoxide asphyxia, with thermal burns as contributing causes. The board could not say how much of the burns came after the three had died. Fire had destroyed 70% of Grissom's spacesuit, 25% of White's, and 15% of Chaffee's"
How the hell did the mindstrm's post get moderated as a Troll?? The first time I read the report I myself wondered whether they were just guessing in order to save the families (and everyone else) from wondering. Sure it's not pleasant to think about, but it's a valid thing to wonder.
It's quite well known that police and fire departments will mis-quote the cause of death in order to save a family greif. But every so often the expressions and positions of a charred corpse make it clear that the person was getting plenty of oxygen for quite some time while dying. (It is possible to get 3rd degree burns from thermal raditation alone.) Remember how long you can hold your breath?
It is theorized that if you inhale hot enough gases that the excruciating pain in your lungs will cause you to black out quickly, but we don't exactly have too much first hand knowledge of that.
Umm, from my Chemistry and Physics background, having a 20% Oxygen 80% Nitrogen atmosphere at full pressure or a 100% Oxygen atmosphere at 1/5 pressure should not change the physics and chemistry of a fire. In either case you have exactly the same number of oxygen molecules occupying the same volume. (I could be wrong, but with my MSc in Physics, I'll want to hear from someone who *really* knows, not some other schmuck like you or me with a semi-informed opinion
However, if you wanted to test the system at sea level and wanted to keep the system handling only Oxygen, then you'd be forced to use 100% Oxygen at full atmospheric pressure. Now *that* was a mistake.
BTW: I'm quite annoyed at all the people saying "we didn't know an oxygen atmosphere was that dangerous".
This was a standard Tombstone Technology incident. The US AirForce and others published lots of information in the preceeding 5-10 years showing just how dangerous a fire in a full oxygen atmosphere was, but *numerous* people have to die in numerous incidents (or one big/famous one) to make the awareness of the information global. Other sections of the NASA article that the slashdot article links to itself lists 6-12 references to prior publications that clearly indicated the danger of a fire in a 100% oxygen atmosphere.
And don't give me any bull about why they built the door as it was. After the fire they made a door which opened outwards in 3 seconds with as little as a half pound of force, and the door was counterweighted to hold itself open.
Now it *is* true that no-one knew how easily a fire could start in an atmosphere like that. If I remember correctly from reading a more fully detailed report, as a result of the Appolo 1 fire it was discovered that a spark, just one bloody spark, can cause a fire up to two feet away in a pure oxygen environment at atmospheric pressures. (Remember the last time you saw the sun-rays shining in through the window, and you thought to yourself, "wow, look at all that dust".)
I found some paragraphs of the NASA pages linked to in this story to be somewhat self serving and incomplete.
Annoys the hell out of me when "news" sites don't have links to relevant sources of information, or to the very places they got the "news" from. Here is the ESO page.
However here are the puppies you really want. Spectacular as a desktop.
I've always been great at analogies and explaining things to non-technical people, so I'll give this a try.
First off, I have to make you understand something. What the common person thinks of as "common sense" or "natural" is solely defined by the things they've gotten used to observing through their daily lives.
Science is NOT what we think should happen, or what makes "common sense". It is completely defined by what is observed.
Yes, this means that there are hundreds of things that young physicists encounter which *make no common sense*, but yea, there they are. The universe clearly demonstrates time after time that yes, the world works like that, which is completely counter to what you, a big huge blob of carbon and water, normally sees.
Now I'm going to draw a parallel that will hopefully bridge the gap between what you know and believe, and what the universe has taught us.
You've just jumped off a cliff on earth. You're an average human being, you have no strange artificial tools strapped to you. You have some cannonballs and rocks. Bo matter what you do, you will *not* be able to prevent falling down to the bottom. You could madly throw cannonballs and rocks downward, in an effort to use the common-sense principle of action/reaction to "thrust" yourself upwards. But it will not prevent you from falling down, merely slow you. You could have jumped upwards from the cliff, or tried running before jumping off, but either way you're going to fall to the bottom.
Why?
Because this close to the earth, on the edge of a cliff, gravity is quite simply stronger than you could ever be. And that's the way it is.
Maybe if you were a million miles away from the earth and jumping off a satelite, it'd work. You wouldn't need much thrust from a few thrown rocks to get away. But not down here.
Similarly the laws of physics (as we've observed them over a hundred years) tell us that for normal every-day matter that gets that close to a "black hole" (enourmous amount of matter all in one place), there is nothing that can be done to prevent that matter from falling in to the bottom. Even if you converted all but one atom of your mass to thrust, in any conceivable form, that last remaining atom would not be able to get out. It would only delay it's descent. The gravity has simply become *that* strong. Maybe if you were a little further away. But you're not. You're within the "event-horizon", the line which, once stepped over, there is no possibility of escape.
Even if you were a bit of light, the fastest moving, lightest thing in the universe, the gravity will drag you in. And if you're a photon of light, there's no way for you to go any faster, no bit of you that you can "cast off".
thanks for the link!
Not!
What a horrible website. Three minutes of utterly confusing browsing, followed by me typing into their search function "who the f*ck are you?".
I have a range type question.
:)
I'm in an apartment building facing North. I have a friend about 10-20 floors below me (so at minimum there are 10-20 floors worth of concrete between us, I forget exactly what floor he's on).
I have another friend in another building that is to the south-east of my building, and he's on the south side and 15 floors lower down. So that means he's probably got 1-2.5 times as much concrete in the way.
What are my odds that *any* of these protocols will connect us? Even if we're using directional antennas? And what are the RF 'radiation' hazzards for the people living between us
(There are no tall buildings at all to the north of our buildings, just 1-2 story residential houses.)
You said:
> Not from any 802.11b product I have ever encountered
He's talking about 802.11g, note the "g" at the end. No such products currently exist.
That's grossely inefficient.
You are asking every single parent to review, in full, ever single game, movie, and tv show that their child comes in contact with. It's noble, it's doable (seeing as you're probably already highly interested in what you're kids are doing), but it's grossely inefficient.
Don't get all high and mighty on me. I'm not asking that someone do my job as a parent. I'm asking that someone make my job as a parent a bit easier, so I can cook dinner instead of watching over my son's shoulder for an hour trying to figure out if the game he's playing is too violent (and that's *after* it's been bought), or hunting down a reputable review of the damn game before he buy's it.
The whole advantage to society is organization and reducing dulication of effort. You aren't helping.
Cheap. Fast. Good.
CHOSE TWO.
Did you noitce what the CIO wanted? Cheaper software with higher
quality. Then they MUST hold out for the vendors who take the
longest to get to market, or who have the least features.
It'll be a cold day in hell before a CIO does that.
They just don't get it. They want to eat their cake and have it too.
They won't be getting out of this quagmire for some time.