I'd say if it has the ability to disable a person (even temporarily) or cause significant/severe discomfort at the press of a button, it could be a weapon. Tasers, rubber bullets, and tear gas don't kill (many) people either.
That's not to say it can't be used for legitimate purposes; there are just many people who just don't trust China. Honestly, there are a lot of countries who might not be trusted with such equipment. The US is not necessarily excluded from that list, but it's mostly determined by whether you approve or disapprove of the policies of the people behind the trigger.
I think he's cheating because he's never flown the thing 18 miles to prove it, much less at 350 miles per hour for a full tank of fuel. The proposed fuel economy means nothing if there isn't even a demo model which can demonstrate the actual profile is feasible.
Didn't the Colorado(?) company that rented "clean" versions of Hollywood movies lose in court? I can't remember the details, but they bought the DVDs then clipped out the naugty bits and rented them as "family friendly"
The difficulty isn't in creating the forces, it's in making the forces uniform enough that people don't get dizzy. Humans can detect (and are disoriented) by very small variations in gravity. I can't remember the article, but there was one on it in something from the 80s which indicated the minimum size of such a "space station", and it was definitely non-trivial.
It is about balancing risk and cost. Please tell me that you are kidding. The cost, relative to the result, is absolutely enormous. The current security measures cost, in terms of both direct and indirect costs, more than many airline tickets. And the worst thing is that the horses are gone. The chances of anyone getting away with hijacking 4 planes simultaneously, taking over the controls, and flying them into major buildings is so close to zero as to be utterly insignificant. Shoe bombs are right there with it, too.
If you think it is anything other than theater, you're fooling yourself; or rather you've been artfully fooled by your (and my) government.
It was a neat little experiment. There were usually between 5 and 12 experiments on each mission we flew. They didn't get much press as we were always a secondary payload, but they did all sorts of zero-G research with them, from solar constant observations and laser mapping of ocean wave heights, to superfluid helium transfers (a precursor to the ability to "refill" satellites in orbit). Fun stuff, for a science geek.
A decade ago, it cost $100 for someone to touch a part (widget) in a government contract production environment. That accounts for the paper, time, overhead, profit, etc. involved with simply certifying that a particular part was in a particular place at a particular time. Now, a $3000 laptop may seem like an item worth tracking, but if you figure that most employees can't do any amount of work without one (including answering an email), most laptops are less likely to get lost until they are no longer used. Sure, you could check it in and check it out every day, but the "cost" of such tracking would quickly eclipse the cost of the laptop.
No, its more likely that they simply couldn't track down some of the inventory, and there's no check-in/check-out system to determine where it might be if it's not where the property inventory tag database says it should be. Oh, and if its like a normal gov't installation, the prop inventory tag is based on what office it started in 4 years ago when it was bought, and has never been updated over the 3-8 typical office moves a govt employee goes through in that time frame.
Dell M70/M90s easily make this mark, and work well as desktop/laptop machines. They also get far, far better tech support than the regular laptops. It's still probably a waste, but if you consider how bad the internal tech support is, and that in the government you have to have incriminating pictures of someone with farm animals to get anything upgraded, you realize that you order as much as you can when you get the chance.
Are you involved? I remember the original CVX flew on TAS-1 about a decade ago on a Hitchhiker I was involved with. The CVX assembly was done mostly with the engineers who were in (what was then) 720.
Have you ever seen what park rangers make? It makes the fry cook at McDonalds look like serious career advancement.
I'm with you on the big cities thing. There are good reasons to locate an office in a city, but there are really bad ones, too. If you can get the people you need without being downtown, you can do so much more if you locate in the outskirts of a small city. If they'd move out of their $50-75/sf office towers, they could afford to do very good design. Then again, those companies aren't exactly in a cash crunch.
Different scenarios. I pay $75 for a golf lesson, but I also know that I don't bill about $125 during that time, so in effect it's a $200 loss. I count the stress relief and enjoyment as worth it. Since "time away from home" generally counts as "time at the office" for me when we're speaking of commuting, it's much closer to real opportunity cost. Would I rather spend the extra hours away from home for no additional financial benefit? It's not really a "free" work out, since I can't shower when I get to the office - it has to be significantly less than aerobic.
It's not necessarily bogus math for me, as I run my own firm, and billable hours is the only way I get paid. I'm trying to figure out how to spend less time away from the house (I "work" about 60 hours a week right now), so adding 20-30 minutes of commute is counterproductive. FWIW, I actually looked at the economics of getting a very efficient car for short trips and commuting (I drive a truck so I can get on and off of construction sites for my job as an engineer). The truck gets hideous mileage - 12-13 city and 18 on the highway with a tailwind, but it would still be cheaper for me to drive the truck at $10/gal than buy a second car, especially with the property tax regime in VA. It sucks, but until I'm rich I still have to have the money to pay for groceries and the mortgage.
long term it may also make a difference on which Lagrange point they use (stable or unstable), though they're using the unstable L1(?) for the solar observatory, aren't they?
The lowest paid person in my company bills at $55/hr. You're looking at $10 in opportunity cost (assuming 4 miles at 20 minutes vs. 4 miles in 8 minutes) for every trip. $20-25 for your five mile commute, per day. I bill more than double that (yes, this/. post just cost me $10); it's a tough call when you put the dollars in place.
This is also somewhat complicated by the actual performance of objects in orbit. A project I worked on had two satellites in LEO - one main sat with a laser ranger, and one passive "following" sat with a corner cube. By ranging the distance between the two, the earths gravitational field could be mapped very accurately. In other words, two satellites in the exact same orbit will vary in distance with one another constantly throughout an orbit based on the gravitational field. As the orbit precesses, the variation will change from orbit to orbit.
I don't know how this would be dealt with, but it's a bit of a potential stumbling block. (well, that and getting a thin, light, high precision piece of anything into orbit without damaging it)
That's true, but is almost a technicality with today's processors and video cards. With anything but the slowest ultra-portables, having a hd running just doesn't suck up much juice. A Seagate Momentus (5400rpm) takes between 1.9 and 2.3W when reading/writing/seeking, and only 0.8 watts when idle (not standby - that's.2W). Given a typical laptops with between 50 and 80 Wh batteries and a 2 to 3 hour charge life, you're HD comprises about 3% of the average draw at idle, and about 7-8% at full tilt - for those of you running active SQL servers on your lappies. If I give you 30% at non-idle, it's about 4%. That's more power than with a SSD at 0.2W, but it's really only about 4 to 6 minutes of extra time on a charge.
Well, it appears to be true. His male friends are probably geeks, so they wouldn't do well for usability testing, and they probably wouldn't put up with it. His mother and father are probably too far away to use as testers (yes, they're probably as computer literate as my folks, which is to say "barely").
Oddly enough, in the presence of someone who "should know" how to "fix" computers, many people become computer idiots. My wife, for example, helped set up most of an office on NT a decade ago, and even coordinated the T1 installation and a vpn link back to her east coast office (with IT's help. but nobody helping her at the new location). She can troubleshoot most anything when she's at work, but if the paper doesn't come out of the printer at home when she hits "print," all of a sudden her brain turns off and I get a call before she even checks to see if the damned thing is turned on.
You can think of it as the opposite of the "missing widget" problem. I'm perfectly capable of looking through an entire closet to find what I need, but it's much easier to just ask my wife if she's seen it, and let her rummage through the place if I don't see it on first glance. Oddly, this odd shortcoming in males seems about as common as the computer thing with females. There's no particular reason why it appears to be gender based; it just seems to occur that way.
Most engineers are pompous assholes who have no sense of humor, too. It usually takes me the first meeting with new clients to get over that particular hurdle. *shrug*
...they added a poison pill to the articles (or however corporations do such things) in order to prevent a hostile takeover. As a result, ebay's position and their ability to potentially take over Craigslist has been diminished. Boo hoo, cry me a river.
At first, I thought ebay was suing because craigslist was cutting into ebay's auction business. That would be ridiculous, which in American lawyerese seems to be spelled "with merit". Then I was shocked (shocked!) to learn that ebay owns almost 30% of craigslist. Nice little empire, indeed. In reality, it's just a pissing match.
Interesting. I just paid $3.395/gal two days ago, and VA gas tax is 36.5c/gal including federal, state, and local taxes. That's $3.03/gallon for gasoline in my vehicle including transportation, storage, additives, transactions fees, and profit from the refinery door all the way to my cylinders. (FWIW, $3.395 was at the Sheetz on Orange Ave and Williamson in Roanoke, VA, but was pretty typical...I think it went up a nickel yesterday)
Yeah, but nobody expected to be ripping entire DVD collections to HD for use in a media server back then. Now it's economical to do it, especially if you've already got a PC doing DVR work. At less than 20c/GB, it's less than a dollar to rip a typical movie (without the extras and ads) to a server. That compares favorably to putting discs into a jukebox, and has the advantage of speed and playing multiple streams at once.
Now that HD content is out, we need the capacities to go up another order of magnitude so that storing HD is as easy*/cheap as SD.
*I buy discs, but download the rips. My setup is only 720p, so it's easier to get someone else's recode at 720p than do it myself, and it takes less space on my server. With 2TB in DVDs and recorded content off TiVo/OTA, I'm always worried about bumping into the limit on my unRaid box and having to buy more drives.
That's rough, but at $118/bbl, the cost of refined gasoline is somewhere about $2.50/gallon. The $3.50 you're paying at the pump includes distribution and taxes. So you'd pay $3/gallon for a fuel that stores only about 60-65% of the energy as the $3.50/gallon gas your paying now. Not really economical. At their theoretical 100% efficiency, it's about a wash, though you'll still have to visit the pump half again as often to fill up.
Does it make a difference about your green spending if it turns out that the turbine, equipment, and maintenance uses more energy to produce (and may not be done with renewable resources) than you can extract during its useful life? Then you're just trading "bad" energy to produce your windmill now so that you can get "good" energy over the next 20 years. The windmill becomes a battery rather than a generator.
In the case of these turbines, my guess is that - depending on how you do the math - they are batteries with somewhere between 80% and 110% efficiency which have the embodied energy made available over a 25 to 30 year life cycle. Note that at over 100%, you really are getting "green" energy, but at say 110% efficiency, you're still burning 10T of coal today, and you get 11T worth of power out before the machine gets scrapped (excuse me...recycled). It would take 200 years of running those windmills to gain enough energy to build one windmill without non-renewable sources.
I'm not saying it can't be done...just that it's _hard_ to break away from the concept that manufacturing a generator causes some of the problems it purports to solve. Personally, I hope we get over the hump so that more green technologies are available, but I'm keeping my eyes open along the way.
Slashdot Mirror
There are too many 1's in your URL
1. Why not use solar?
2. How are you going to store gaseous H2 efficiently?
I'd say if it has the ability to disable a person (even temporarily) or cause significant/severe discomfort at the press of a button, it could be a weapon. Tasers, rubber bullets, and tear gas don't kill (many) people either.
That's not to say it can't be used for legitimate purposes; there are just many people who just don't trust China. Honestly, there are a lot of countries who might not be trusted with such equipment. The US is not necessarily excluded from that list, but it's mostly determined by whether you approve or disapprove of the policies of the people behind the trigger.
I think he's cheating because he's never flown the thing 18 miles to prove it, much less at 350 miles per hour for a full tank of fuel. The proposed fuel economy means nothing if there isn't even a demo model which can demonstrate the actual profile is feasible.
Didn't the Colorado(?) company that rented "clean" versions of Hollywood movies lose in court? I can't remember the details, but they bought the DVDs then clipped out the naugty bits and rented them as "family friendly"
The difficulty isn't in creating the forces, it's in making the forces uniform enough that people don't get dizzy. Humans can detect (and are disoriented) by very small variations in gravity. I can't remember the article, but there was one on it in something from the 80s which indicated the minimum size of such a "space station", and it was definitely non-trivial.
If you think it is anything other than theater, you're fooling yourself; or rather you've been artfully fooled by your (and my) government.
It was a neat little experiment. There were usually between 5 and 12 experiments on each mission we flew. They didn't get much press as we were always a secondary payload, but they did all sorts of zero-G research with them, from solar constant observations and laser mapping of ocean wave heights, to superfluid helium transfers (a precursor to the ability to "refill" satellites in orbit). Fun stuff, for a science geek.
A decade ago, it cost $100 for someone to touch a part (widget) in a government contract production environment. That accounts for the paper, time, overhead, profit, etc. involved with simply certifying that a particular part was in a particular place at a particular time. Now, a $3000 laptop may seem like an item worth tracking, but if you figure that most employees can't do any amount of work without one (including answering an email), most laptops are less likely to get lost until they are no longer used. Sure, you could check it in and check it out every day, but the "cost" of such tracking would quickly eclipse the cost of the laptop.
No, its more likely that they simply couldn't track down some of the inventory, and there's no check-in/check-out system to determine where it might be if it's not where the property inventory tag database says it should be. Oh, and if its like a normal gov't installation, the prop inventory tag is based on what office it started in 4 years ago when it was bought, and has never been updated over the 3-8 typical office moves a govt employee goes through in that time frame.
Dell M70/M90s easily make this mark, and work well as desktop/laptop machines. They also get far, far better tech support than the regular laptops. It's still probably a waste, but if you consider how bad the internal tech support is, and that in the government you have to have incriminating pictures of someone with farm animals to get anything upgraded, you realize that you order as much as you can when you get the chance.
Are you involved? I remember the original CVX flew on TAS-1 about a decade ago on a Hitchhiker I was involved with. The CVX assembly was done mostly with the engineers who were in (what was then) 720.
Have you ever seen what park rangers make? It makes the fry cook at McDonalds look like serious career advancement.
I'm with you on the big cities thing. There are good reasons to locate an office in a city, but there are really bad ones, too. If you can get the people you need without being downtown, you can do so much more if you locate in the outskirts of a small city. If they'd move out of their $50-75/sf office towers, they could afford to do very good design. Then again, those companies aren't exactly in a cash crunch.
Something's wrong when you title your post IANAL, but your username is JD. :-)
Different scenarios. I pay $75 for a golf lesson, but I also know that I don't bill about $125 during that time, so in effect it's a $200 loss. I count the stress relief and enjoyment as worth it. Since "time away from home" generally counts as "time at the office" for me when we're speaking of commuting, it's much closer to real opportunity cost. Would I rather spend the extra hours away from home for no additional financial benefit? It's not really a "free" work out, since I can't shower when I get to the office - it has to be significantly less than aerobic.
It's not necessarily bogus math for me, as I run my own firm, and billable hours is the only way I get paid. I'm trying to figure out how to spend less time away from the house (I "work" about 60 hours a week right now), so adding 20-30 minutes of commute is counterproductive. FWIW, I actually looked at the economics of getting a very efficient car for short trips and commuting (I drive a truck so I can get on and off of construction sites for my job as an engineer). The truck gets hideous mileage - 12-13 city and 18 on the highway with a tailwind, but it would still be cheaper for me to drive the truck at $10/gal than buy a second car, especially with the property tax regime in VA. It sucks, but until I'm rich I still have to have the money to pay for groceries and the mortgage.
long term it may also make a difference on which Lagrange point they use (stable or unstable), though they're using the unstable L1(?) for the solar observatory, aren't they?
The lowest paid person in my company bills at $55/hr. You're looking at $10 in opportunity cost (assuming 4 miles at 20 minutes vs. 4 miles in 8 minutes) for every trip. $20-25 for your five mile commute, per day. I bill more than double that (yes, this /. post just cost me $10); it's a tough call when you put the dollars in place.
This is also somewhat complicated by the actual performance of objects in orbit. A project I worked on had two satellites in LEO - one main sat with a laser ranger, and one passive "following" sat with a corner cube. By ranging the distance between the two, the earths gravitational field could be mapped very accurately. In other words, two satellites in the exact same orbit will vary in distance with one another constantly throughout an orbit based on the gravitational field. As the orbit precesses, the variation will change from orbit to orbit.
I don't know how this would be dealt with, but it's a bit of a potential stumbling block. (well, that and getting a thin, light, high precision piece of anything into orbit without damaging it)
Without /., I've gotten so much done. I might just have to go home early today. No sense in setting a bad precedent.
That's true, but is almost a technicality with today's processors and video cards. With anything but the slowest ultra-portables, having a hd running just doesn't suck up much juice. A Seagate Momentus (5400rpm) takes between 1.9 and 2.3W when reading/writing/seeking, and only 0.8 watts when idle (not standby - that's .2W). Given a typical laptops with between 50 and 80 Wh batteries and a 2 to 3 hour charge life, you're HD comprises about 3% of the average draw at idle, and about 7-8% at full tilt - for those of you running active SQL servers on your lappies. If I give you 30% at non-idle, it's about 4%. That's more power than with a SSD at 0.2W, but it's really only about 4 to 6 minutes of extra time on a charge.
Well, it appears to be true. His male friends are probably geeks, so they wouldn't do well for usability testing, and they probably wouldn't put up with it. His mother and father are probably too far away to use as testers (yes, they're probably as computer literate as my folks, which is to say "barely").
Oddly enough, in the presence of someone who "should know" how to "fix" computers, many people become computer idiots. My wife, for example, helped set up most of an office on NT a decade ago, and even coordinated the T1 installation and a vpn link back to her east coast office (with IT's help. but nobody helping her at the new location). She can troubleshoot most anything when she's at work, but if the paper doesn't come out of the printer at home when she hits "print," all of a sudden her brain turns off and I get a call before she even checks to see if the damned thing is turned on.
You can think of it as the opposite of the "missing widget" problem. I'm perfectly capable of looking through an entire closet to find what I need, but it's much easier to just ask my wife if she's seen it, and let her rummage through the place if I don't see it on first glance. Oddly, this odd shortcoming in males seems about as common as the computer thing with females. There's no particular reason why it appears to be gender based; it just seems to occur that way.
Most engineers are pompous assholes who have no sense of humor, too. It usually takes me the first meeting with new clients to get over that particular hurdle. *shrug*
...they added a poison pill to the articles (or however corporations do such things) in order to prevent a hostile takeover. As a result, ebay's position and their ability to potentially take over Craigslist has been diminished. Boo hoo, cry me a river.
At first, I thought ebay was suing because craigslist was cutting into ebay's auction business. That would be ridiculous, which in American lawyerese seems to be spelled "with merit". Then I was shocked (shocked!) to learn that ebay owns almost 30% of craigslist. Nice little empire, indeed. In reality, it's just a pissing match.
Interesting. I just paid $3.395/gal two days ago, and VA gas tax is 36.5c/gal including federal, state, and local taxes. That's $3.03/gallon for gasoline in my vehicle including transportation, storage, additives, transactions fees, and profit from the refinery door all the way to my cylinders. (FWIW, $3.395 was at the Sheetz on Orange Ave and Williamson in Roanoke, VA, but was pretty typical...I think it went up a nickel yesterday)
Yeah, but nobody expected to be ripping entire DVD collections to HD for use in a media server back then. Now it's economical to do it, especially if you've already got a PC doing DVR work. At less than 20c/GB, it's less than a dollar to rip a typical movie (without the extras and ads) to a server. That compares favorably to putting discs into a jukebox, and has the advantage of speed and playing multiple streams at once.
Now that HD content is out, we need the capacities to go up another order of magnitude so that storing HD is as easy*/cheap as SD.
*I buy discs, but download the rips. My setup is only 720p, so it's easier to get someone else's recode at 720p than do it myself, and it takes less space on my server. With 2TB in DVDs and recorded content off TiVo/OTA, I'm always worried about bumping into the limit on my unRaid box and having to buy more drives.
That's rough, but at $118/bbl, the cost of refined gasoline is somewhere about $2.50/gallon. The $3.50 you're paying at the pump includes distribution and taxes. So you'd pay $3/gallon for a fuel that stores only about 60-65% of the energy as the $3.50/gallon gas your paying now. Not really economical. At their theoretical 100% efficiency, it's about a wash, though you'll still have to visit the pump half again as often to fill up.
Does it make a difference about your green spending if it turns out that the turbine, equipment, and maintenance uses more energy to produce (and may not be done with renewable resources) than you can extract during its useful life? Then you're just trading "bad" energy to produce your windmill now so that you can get "good" energy over the next 20 years. The windmill becomes a battery rather than a generator.
In the case of these turbines, my guess is that - depending on how you do the math - they are batteries with somewhere between 80% and 110% efficiency which have the embodied energy made available over a 25 to 30 year life cycle. Note that at over 100%, you really are getting "green" energy, but at say 110% efficiency, you're still burning 10T of coal today, and you get 11T worth of power out before the machine gets scrapped (excuse me...recycled). It would take 200 years of running those windmills to gain enough energy to build one windmill without non-renewable sources.
I'm not saying it can't be done...just that it's _hard_ to break away from the concept that manufacturing a generator causes some of the problems it purports to solve. Personally, I hope we get over the hump so that more green technologies are available, but I'm keeping my eyes open along the way.