No, I don't think my bird comparison is that far off at all. As you noted, birds/ornithopters are more energy-efficient than helicopters (the more they glide, the more efficient). But even so, they still have to employ a lot of extreme weight-reduction strategies and need a huge power-to-weight ratio. So obviously, helicopters are even worse.
BTW, the sheeple have already taken over and are begging for a police state. Just look at my original post: it's modded 0, Troll. That shows that a lot of people here already think privacy is not necessary and that we really do need to sacrifice all liberties for a hollow assurance of safety. If Slashdotters of all people believe this, you can imagine what the rest of the population's opinion on the matter is.
Despite what these nutcases do, not all, or probably even most Christians believe such silliness. Especially if you get outside America, since that seems to be the hotbed of fundamentalism these days. The Christians over in Europe don't buy into this insanity.
However, there's a bunch of other Christians that pop up any time stories like this arise, claiming these people aren't "true Christians". It's just the No True Scotsman argument all over again. They also try to disclaim every other Christian group or sect that they're embarrassed by or believe to be too divergent: Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, snake handlers, Creationists (young earth or not), Catholics, Protestants who aren't evangelical, people in a different Protestant denomination, etc.
I wouldn't be so sure. With humans neutering cats whenever they can, this could put evolutionary pressure on housecats to become smarter, as the smarter ones will figure out how to avoid the dreaded visit to the vet to get their balls whacked off.
Plus, a smarter cat might know better how to seek out and take advantage of female cats in heat, and lay traps for other un-neutered males so they can't get to the chicks first.
Sorry, but the contents of this article ARE what Christians teach. It's just like how it's true that Americans do actually drive around in silly jacked-up pickup trucks. The catch is, not ALL Christians believe this stuff, but the people in this article really are Christian (you only have to believe Jesus was the son of God to be a Christian), and they really do believe it. You don't get to claim they're not "true Christians" just because their beliefs are different from yours.
Christianity is a very large and unorganized religion (certain sects are organized, but not the whole thing), and its members believe in many widely diverging things, such as creationism, snake-handling, that you'll become a god of your own planet if you're a good person in this life, etc.
You can always move out of the country. Tons of Americans are doing it these days, and the rate seems to be accelerating; people are getting out before the ship sinks.
It's exactly the same as Germany in the late 20s/early 30s; all the smart Germans got the hell out while they could, since they saw something bad was coming.
I don't think so; a larger airfoil has more friction. It's not like you can move some zero-weight airfoil through the air with zero energy; even with no mass it'll still have air resistance. The whole way a helicopter hovers is by forcing air downwards at a rate sufficient to counteract gravity; there's no way that's going to be a low-energy feat, even if you made your craft zero-mass (well, it might be zero energy if the zero-mass craft weren't carrying any passengers or cargo, but that's not too useful).
Again, that can get you sued, since it's obviously a ploy to trash a former employee's reputation. If you're a small employer, you probably won't be sued for the reasons I stated before (not enough money for a lawyer to take the case), but if you're Microsoft, you just made a multi-million-dollar error.
Finally, calling a previous employer is stupid anyway. Why do you think the employee is leaving the former employer? If it was such a great place to work, then obviously he'd still be working there. He left because there was some sort of disagreement, and employers almost always hate it when an employee leaves them (even if it's because their pay sucks). What do you think you're going to hear when you call them up? A glowing review? "Yeah, he was an excellent employee, but we're a bunch of cheap-asses and made him work 100 hours/week for terrible pay, so we were all happy for him when he found another job, even though this totally blows our product development schedule out of the water since there's no way we're going to find another sucker to work that hard for so little money in time to make our deadline!"
That's a good question. However, as an engineer, I feel obliged to point out that this exercise, while interesting, has absolutely zero practicality or usefulness. Even if you could reduce the helicopter's mass to zero, the amount of energy a human would have to expend to keep himself aloft is staggering. Obviously, a fit human can do it for a minute or three, an athlete like Lance Armstrong might be able to keep it up for 5-10, but that's it; after that, they'll be crashing.
Not only that, this test isn't very realistic as far as helicopters are concerned: they're not far enough away from the ground. Close to the ground, you get the in-ground hover effect, which reduces the amount of power you need to stay aloft. Over 10 feet or so, you go into out-of-ground effect, and then your power requirements increase significantly. In-ground effect is only useful for taxiing to your runway or helipad; if you want to hover anywhere else, you're generally doing it out-of-ground. So even a fit human will have a much harder time keeping that up for long, even with a zero-mass machine. There's a reason birds have hollow bones, and why even hummingbirds (which hover rather than glide) have very limited flight durations, despite their tiny size and mass.
The sarcasm couldn't be more obvious. And I'm starting to think that if the sheeple are so dumb they're willing to allow a police state to take over, then maybe they deserve it. Everyone gets the government they deserve.
President Clinton shows his face asking for donations, and does a lot of charity work internationally. However, he's no longer the President; while he has a certain amount of influence because of his former position, he no longer has any real power within the US government.
That would basically render the whole exercise pointless, because any energy-storage device on-board the craft could be powered by any form of energy. For instance, if you could build a giant 8-seat helicopter and power it with electric batteries, then even a human could "power" it by using an exercise bike to charge the batteries, very slowly, over the course of days or months. I think the whole idea is to make a craft that's so light that a human can power it directly; by storing energy, you can make the craft as big and heavy as you want.
They're probably mostly in Switzerland, and possibly in some other nearby European countries like Germany and France. Why on earth would they want to move to America? Switzerland is a great place, with the highest standard of living in the world.
You don't need privacy. If you're not willing to show the public every aspect of your life, then you're surely a terrorist or a criminal. We need to ban privacy for the good of the children, and to keep us all safe from terrorists!
but the only public rifle range in the vicinity is not just crowded, but has a bunch of particularly silly range rules (like having only 1 cartridge loaded in a magazine at a time!)
Yes, I forgot about that factor too. Many ranges have silly rules like this that make them pretty miserable places to go shoot. I tried skeet shooting at a place that had a similar rule for shotguns, even though I have a pump-action shotgun. Loading cartridges one-at-a-time in those is a bit of a pain, and totally unnecessary. Having to take turns shooting with some strangers I don't know, who are showing off their super-expensive limited-edition fancy gold-plated shotguns and giving me looks because I just have a cheap but effective Mossberg, and having to yell "pull!" at some weird automated system isn't much fun either. I'd rather go to some open area and have a friend manually toss clay pigeons with a pigeon tosser (it's a special plastic tool that grips the clay pigeon, and has a long arm so you can toss the pigeon a long way if you do it right), and save a ton of money in the process, rather than having to load a bunch of coins in the above-mentioned automated system just to get a few pigeons and put up with the snobs.
Well obviously I don't subscribe to patented genes either, but we're not even talking about GMO here, we're talking about traits acquired through selective breeding. Selective breeding has been done for millennia now; that's how we have dogs and cows and sheep. I've never heard of anyone trying to claim copyright on organisms produced by selective breeding.
Bullshit. Intel has fully open-sourced drivers (and therefore, documentation too), and there's no patent trolls suing them over it. I'm pretty sure AMD/ATI has also opened up much of their specs, and again, no patent trolls to be found.
Yes, this is called "binning". Intel does it for CPUs too.
The thing is, just because a chip is marked for a lower speed doesn't mean that's all it's capable of; companies usually sell many more of a low-end product than a high-end product, so if a run has lots of parts good for the higher speeds, they're not going to just mark them for the high speeds and have a shortage of the low-speed parts that all the budget-conscious consumers want, and a glut of expensive parts that very few people are willing to pay for. So many parts may in fact be capable of higher speeds than they're rated for. Of course, each one is different; with two chips marked identically, one might not be overclockable much at all, and the other might be able to get significantly better performance. The marked speed is what's guaranteed, that's all, and manufacturers are always conservative with their ratings to avoid warranty problems.
You don't need license to make a copy of an Austrian town that's hundreds of years old.
As for agriculture strains, those are natural (though changed through generations of controlled breeding). Copyright doesn't apply there. Are you trying to tell me it'd be illegal to make a clone of someone's pedigreed pet dog? Bullshit. And if it is, that's one law I think the Chinese would be fully justified in ignoring. Western countries rely far too much on this "intellectual property" bullshit, instead of actually making money by making real things.
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No, I don't think my bird comparison is that far off at all. As you noted, birds/ornithopters are more energy-efficient than helicopters (the more they glide, the more efficient). But even so, they still have to employ a lot of extreme weight-reduction strategies and need a huge power-to-weight ratio. So obviously, helicopters are even worse.
BTW, the sheeple have already taken over and are begging for a police state. Just look at my original post: it's modded 0, Troll. That shows that a lot of people here already think privacy is not necessary and that we really do need to sacrifice all liberties for a hollow assurance of safety. If Slashdotters of all people believe this, you can imagine what the rest of the population's opinion on the matter is.
Smart humans DO get all the chicks: smart but unethical humans that is. The ones who are "nice guys" don't. But cats don't have this problem.
There's two problems here:
Despite what these nutcases do, not all, or probably even most Christians believe such silliness. Especially if you get outside America, since that seems to be the hotbed of fundamentalism these days. The Christians over in Europe don't buy into this insanity.
However, there's a bunch of other Christians that pop up any time stories like this arise, claiming these people aren't "true Christians". It's just the No True Scotsman argument all over again. They also try to disclaim every other Christian group or sect that they're embarrassed by or believe to be too divergent: Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, snake handlers, Creationists (young earth or not), Catholics, Protestants who aren't evangelical, people in a different Protestant denomination, etc.
As I said in another post, it's quite possible to leave the country. They're not shooting people who try to escape---yet.
I wouldn't be so sure. With humans neutering cats whenever they can, this could put evolutionary pressure on housecats to become smarter, as the smarter ones will figure out how to avoid the dreaded visit to the vet to get their balls whacked off.
Plus, a smarter cat might know better how to seek out and take advantage of female cats in heat, and lay traps for other un-neutered males so they can't get to the chicks first.
Sorry, but the contents of this article ARE what Christians teach. It's just like how it's true that Americans do actually drive around in silly jacked-up pickup trucks. The catch is, not ALL Christians believe this stuff, but the people in this article really are Christian (you only have to believe Jesus was the son of God to be a Christian), and they really do believe it. You don't get to claim they're not "true Christians" just because their beliefs are different from yours.
Christianity is a very large and unorganized religion (certain sects are organized, but not the whole thing), and its members believe in many widely diverging things, such as creationism, snake-handling, that you'll become a god of your own planet if you're a good person in this life, etc.
You can always move out of the country. Tons of Americans are doing it these days, and the rate seems to be accelerating; people are getting out before the ship sinks.
It's exactly the same as Germany in the late 20s/early 30s; all the smart Germans got the hell out while they could, since they saw something bad was coming.
I don't think so; a larger airfoil has more friction. It's not like you can move some zero-weight airfoil through the air with zero energy; even with no mass it'll still have air resistance. The whole way a helicopter hovers is by forcing air downwards at a rate sufficient to counteract gravity; there's no way that's going to be a low-energy feat, even if you made your craft zero-mass (well, it might be zero energy if the zero-mass craft weren't carrying any passengers or cargo, but that's not too useful).
Again, that can get you sued, since it's obviously a ploy to trash a former employee's reputation. If you're a small employer, you probably won't be sued for the reasons I stated before (not enough money for a lawyer to take the case), but if you're Microsoft, you just made a multi-million-dollar error.
Finally, calling a previous employer is stupid anyway. Why do you think the employee is leaving the former employer? If it was such a great place to work, then obviously he'd still be working there. He left because there was some sort of disagreement, and employers almost always hate it when an employee leaves them (even if it's because their pay sucks). What do you think you're going to hear when you call them up? A glowing review? "Yeah, he was an excellent employee, but we're a bunch of cheap-asses and made him work 100 hours/week for terrible pay, so we were all happy for him when he found another job, even though this totally blows our product development schedule out of the water since there's no way we're going to find another sucker to work that hard for so little money in time to make our deadline!"
That's a good question. However, as an engineer, I feel obliged to point out that this exercise, while interesting, has absolutely zero practicality or usefulness. Even if you could reduce the helicopter's mass to zero, the amount of energy a human would have to expend to keep himself aloft is staggering. Obviously, a fit human can do it for a minute or three, an athlete like Lance Armstrong might be able to keep it up for 5-10, but that's it; after that, they'll be crashing.
Not only that, this test isn't very realistic as far as helicopters are concerned: they're not far enough away from the ground. Close to the ground, you get the in-ground hover effect, which reduces the amount of power you need to stay aloft. Over 10 feet or so, you go into out-of-ground effect, and then your power requirements increase significantly. In-ground effect is only useful for taxiing to your runway or helipad; if you want to hover anywhere else, you're generally doing it out-of-ground. So even a fit human will have a much harder time keeping that up for long, even with a zero-mass machine. There's a reason birds have hollow bones, and why even hummingbirds (which hover rather than glide) have very limited flight durations, despite their tiny size and mass.
The sarcasm couldn't be more obvious. And I'm starting to think that if the sheeple are so dumb they're willing to allow a police state to take over, then maybe they deserve it. Everyone gets the government they deserve.
If the Corporations get their way, pretty soon that's exactly what'll be happening to anyone that infringes on their "IP".
President Clinton shows his face asking for donations, and does a lot of charity work internationally. However, he's no longer the President; while he has a certain amount of influence because of his former position, he no longer has any real power within the US government.
That would basically render the whole exercise pointless, because any energy-storage device on-board the craft could be powered by any form of energy. For instance, if you could build a giant 8-seat helicopter and power it with electric batteries, then even a human could "power" it by using an exercise bike to charge the batteries, very slowly, over the course of days or months. I think the whole idea is to make a craft that's so light that a human can power it directly; by storing energy, you can make the craft as big and heavy as you want.
They're probably mostly in Switzerland, and possibly in some other nearby European countries like Germany and France. Why on earth would they want to move to America? Switzerland is a great place, with the highest standard of living in the world.
If the clerk heard that the costumer is intending to send the ipad to Iran
I don't think there's anything in this article about this girl making costumes.
I wonder if they could get around that law by buying roller bearings instead?
You don't need privacy. If you're not willing to show the public every aspect of your life, then you're surely a terrorist or a criminal. We need to ban privacy for the good of the children, and to keep us all safe from terrorists!
but the only public rifle range in the vicinity is not just crowded, but has a bunch of particularly silly range rules (like having only 1 cartridge loaded in a magazine at a time!)
Yes, I forgot about that factor too. Many ranges have silly rules like this that make them pretty miserable places to go shoot. I tried skeet shooting at a place that had a similar rule for shotguns, even though I have a pump-action shotgun. Loading cartridges one-at-a-time in those is a bit of a pain, and totally unnecessary. Having to take turns shooting with some strangers I don't know, who are showing off their super-expensive limited-edition fancy gold-plated shotguns and giving me looks because I just have a cheap but effective Mossberg, and having to yell "pull!" at some weird automated system isn't much fun either. I'd rather go to some open area and have a friend manually toss clay pigeons with a pigeon tosser (it's a special plastic tool that grips the clay pigeon, and has a long arm so you can toss the pigeon a long way if you do it right), and save a ton of money in the process, rather than having to load a bunch of coins in the above-mentioned automated system just to get a few pigeons and put up with the snobs.
You would only think that if you think that Obama is an opponent of the Republicans. He's not. They're part of the same party.
Well obviously I don't subscribe to patented genes either, but we're not even talking about GMO here, we're talking about traits acquired through selective breeding. Selective breeding has been done for millennia now; that's how we have dogs and cows and sheep. I've never heard of anyone trying to claim copyright on organisms produced by selective breeding.
Bullshit. Intel has fully open-sourced drivers (and therefore, documentation too), and there's no patent trolls suing them over it. I'm pretty sure AMD/ATI has also opened up much of their specs, and again, no patent trolls to be found.
Yes, this is called "binning". Intel does it for CPUs too.
The thing is, just because a chip is marked for a lower speed doesn't mean that's all it's capable of; companies usually sell many more of a low-end product than a high-end product, so if a run has lots of parts good for the higher speeds, they're not going to just mark them for the high speeds and have a shortage of the low-speed parts that all the budget-conscious consumers want, and a glut of expensive parts that very few people are willing to pay for. So many parts may in fact be capable of higher speeds than they're rated for. Of course, each one is different; with two chips marked identically, one might not be overclockable much at all, and the other might be able to get significantly better performance. The marked speed is what's guaranteed, that's all, and manufacturers are always conservative with their ratings to avoid warranty problems.
You don't need license to make a copy of an Austrian town that's hundreds of years old.
As for agriculture strains, those are natural (though changed through generations of controlled breeding). Copyright doesn't apply there. Are you trying to tell me it'd be illegal to make a clone of someone's pedigreed pet dog? Bullshit. And if it is, that's one law I think the Chinese would be fully justified in ignoring. Western countries rely far too much on this "intellectual property" bullshit, instead of actually making money by making real things.