Your example of blowing the air into a rigid container of smaller size is non-sensical...
Your point about the high speed pictures confirms that the grandparent was correct about the "bang" being produced by the latex and not the expanding air. I was wrong about this.
There's a very nice explanation of the physics here: http://www.balloonhq.com/faq/howpop.html#wh ybang
However, the air *is* compressed inside the balloon. By exactly the amount required to strain the latex. At least you've had the decency to say so, as well!:)
Your lecturer read the same textbook as mine - and insisted that the pressure inside the balloon is exactly the same as the pressure outside.
He would not be convinced that the pressure inside the balloon is equal to the pressure inside plus the pressure required to elastically deform the latex, and that the energy released when a balloon was popped was a demonstration of this stored energy.
At least you have the decency to contradict yourself:
"The pressure outside the balloon is the same as the pressure inside the balloon. [...] it does compress the air inside--but not much, just 5 or 6 mm of mercury"
You what? I think you need to re-enrol in Materials Selection 101.
Maybe if you're talking specific strength (strengh to weight), but otherwise there is no condition (torsional, longitudinal or transverse)where a solid bar would be weaker than a hollow bar*.
*Excluding strange situations where inertial loading becomes significant!
If I reduce my spending on other items, I have reduced my "standard of living". This is how I pay for the more expensive car - it's just shuffling the cost of my decision around diffently, but it's still a cost.
Have you ever calculated how many kilometres you need to drive in an old, gas guzzling pollution spewing tank to equal the pollution production of a new car? Last time I did it, it was about double the average lifetime distance of a car. So, the best thing for the environment is to keep driving the old car.
The chain of ownership as the car is passed on is a zero sum game, environmentally - the newest car effectively replaces the oldest car in the fleet - which I think you implied in your post, but I wanted to clarify it. I wonder about the transaction costs though - the more transactions made, the more used car salesmen are supported. They have a negative effect on the environment, just like the rest of us, and surely most people would agree that fewer used car salesmen are a good thing!
"So?" I hear you say? Those used care salemen would still exist, doing something else, still hurting the environment, just like the rest of us. Well, not necessarily. Either we could maintain our current standard of living with fewer people, thereby reducing our impact on the environment, or we could have a higher standard of living with the same number of people by re-employing those used car salesmen elsewhere. Thereby allowing us to choose the more expensive efficient car and have the same standard of living.
And the circle is closed:)
Oh, and sure - if you must replace your car anyway, then it's time to make the best choice you can.
Extremists depend on power bases of "bigoted/ignorant/stupid/closed-minded" people. Australia's compulsory voting means that the centrist, apathetic majority has to at least choose the "least worst" option every few years, moderating the more opiniated extremists at both ends of the spectrum.
Australian (Federal) politics over the last two decades in particular has been a race to claim the centre, hoping to push the other side towards their extremist powerbases. The US Presidential race seems (from afar) to be mostly about shoring up your support within your existing camp.
In order to save 50% on the cost of hanging power lines, and 50% of power loss through the lines, the electric potential in power lines is relative to earth - effectively the Earth is used as the return circuit.
Which has the unfortunate side effect that you can be electrocuted between active and the Earth (i.e. touching a single wire) rather than having to touch two wires simultaneously with different hands... but it appears to be worth it.
Presumably high voltage line pairs aren't doing something tricky with the phase of the power to give the effect you describe... because no-one thought HV had any effect. Until now.
Total material cost of a typical car is 50 pounds for the metal, 200 pounds for the energy spent. The average cost of a new car in England is around 10k pounds.
It's all about market drive.
50 UK pounds ~ $125 AUD. Steel (coil) costs around $1/kilogram in bulk. A 1250kg car is about 50% steel/iron, so you're at around $625, or 250 UK pounds already. Give or take.:)
Then you need to add the glass, aluminium, plastic, copper, brass, and everything else.
The last line seems to infer that the cost of a car is driven only by profiteering. Perhaps in response to economic factors such as poor supply and high demand? Not true - nearly every market segment is crowded with makes and models. Supply is very competitive.
The amount of investment required to deliver the amount of processing and technology in the average econobox is simply staggering. The quality and delivery demands are much higher than many other industries, but also go hand in hand with very high liabilities.
As an engineer for a Tier 1 supplier, it astounds me that cars are so damn cheap!
One alcohol type = Bad Lager, Pilsener, Stout, Scotch and Gin = Good.
Honest, officer.
Re:Australia's plastic money is much better..
on
Cashless Society
·
· Score: 1
I just pulled $100 out of the ATM yesterday - the years are 96,97,98,02,02. So it seems like they print every year.:)
However, I thought when I removed them from the ATM that they were brand new notes, and wouldn't have been surprised to see them have sequential serial numbers. Now that's impressive!
I don't understand why the US still uses bills all the same colour and all the same size.... and paper no less!
My uncle had a Compaq "Portable", back in the day. It was the size of a suitcase, and the full size keyboard folded up over the 6 inch monitor and floppy drives. I believe he still has it somewhere.
Oh, and just last week the test engineer at work was watching an automotive crash test video on an indutrial pc - think mini tower with lcd screen on the side and keyboard integrated into the cover.
I have a step sister who is deaf and brain damaged from birth. She can certainly speak a language, sign language. And yes, she is certainly human - she has feelings, and a personality.
However, her capacity for abstract thought is limited. Just because she doesn't speak of the future beyond her next birthday party (which is always "next month") doesn't mean she doesn't have a language.
And to make the trivial point - at some point the meerkats expressed a new concept - "human". It doesn't matter which arrived last, the humans or the meerkats or the language, there was time when there was no understanding of the sound for human, and now there is.
... and there are many others. I believe that many manufacturing technology institutes (technology transfer institutes also), such as the one I'm familiar with, QMI, have done work into the effectiveness / requirements pertaining to quality and problem solving methods, in order to lend credibility to their recommendations. Check your local guides.:)
Personally, I've found it very interesting to look at the social, political and economic conditions that caused these "lean manufacturing" ideologies to develop in Japan first. The best explanation I've heard so far is that during the American occupation of Japan after WW2, many labor laws and conditions were put in place, making the HR environment very different. This combined with cultural differences and a need to develop very good manufacturing and assembly industries because of Japan's (supposed - I haven't checked for myself) low level of mineral resources and more compact manufacturing facilites to drive this development.
In effect, raw material, manpower and space became much more expensive than in the Western world. This meant that higher levels of automation and more emphasis on waste reduction could be justified.
So, a set of advanced manufacturing ideologies evolved to suit the prevailing conditions. The ideologies are expanding, displacing the old ideologies in the western manufacturing world, especially in the automotive sector. You can thank this for the vastly increased quality and rapid technology advance in many modern cars.
But when someone comes to you with that look in their eye and says "We need to implement 5S to save the company!", I believe it pays to look at these techniques through OUR eyes. For us, it may well be more prudent to build a larger factory. Or lay off workers in the tough times - the inflexibility of the Japanese labour market has been blamed for keeping Japan's economic growth stunted for the last decade or so.
Slavish adherance to any ideology is bad..... is that what makes things become "-isms"?
I find the two prevailing attitudes in most of these posts really disturbing.
Not doing unpleasant chores for your family, like Windows support - I mean, they are your family ferchrissakes.
Second, the idea that you can be a programmer/linux/mainframe person and know nothing about PC's. The parent of the this post is the most reasonable attempt at explanation of the lot. However, with an education, a developed analytical reasoning ability, lack of fear about items technological and an understanding of the principles of operation, there shouldn't be many problems most of your family could have that you could not assist with.
Yes, you SHOULD be able to find the networking configuration of any GUI OS, for example. You SHOULD be able to take in the available information, formulate a theory, test the hypothesis and observe the results. You SHOULD be able to use whatever experience you do have, even if the situation is one you have not previously encountered.
Unless of course you're a reasonably bright kid who was into computers early and skipped a proper unversity education to catch the IT boom and are now looking down the barrel of 40 years in a mature industry with no qualifications and no learning skills with which to update your specific technical knowledge.
And no family who feel the need to support you when you need help.
Re:I think we're forgetting something
on
Software For Ransom
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Next, the vaporware point - there are two counter-arguments here. If you don't like giving money to vaporware, don't! Support released projects, if you feel it's worth it. Also, the page linked to in the article specifically mentions: "Details: In short, Authors (the programmers of the software) first publish their work under a Ransom License (a special proprietary license)." (My italics.) It's not about paying for vaporware, it's about buying software if you think it's a worthwhile investment, with the possibility that it may become Free in the future, with all the associated benefits.
I believe that this model may be suitable for a great number of projects. I am sure many people's gripe with Microsoft, RIAA et al is not that they sell their digital information as a commercial product, which we can choose to buy or ignore, but that the business model they use does not reflect the real costs. It costs a lot of money to design, code, and market a product, but then it's cheap to duplicate that product. Trouble is, we are made to pay for these items long after the amortised cost of development has been returned - hence the astronomical profits of some successful companies.
These factors apply at different scales to many different products - and some scales are currently out of reach for Free Software. The principle is that it does take an investment of time and money to do some things (whether you personally think they should be done that way or not), and that this method may be a good way to gain a reasonable return on that investment without locking the product into a higher price in perpetuity than necessary.
Yes, it's similar to copyright - you get a limited time to exploit a body of work in order to realise a return, but then it's available for The Public Good. Do you think a non-profit organisation could have made the LOTR trilogy without being able to deliver some commercial benefit to its backers? How cool would it be, now that it has made millions for the studio, if legitimate high quality digital copies were available for the cost of making the DVD?
I'll finish (finally) with an example - a group of programmers would like to create an advanced compatibility driver set for GNU/Linux, to match or beat the drivers already available for Windows, for a large range of hardware. However, to buy one of each piece of hardware for testing, to look at the detailed product documentation (which is all freely supplied by hardware makers, naturally), to write the drivers, test them, to have somewhere to do it, and to publish them will take money. Say, $500,000 - even if the programmer's time is gratis. More if they need to eat and/or sleep. With Windows, you pay for that cost, a real cost, in every copy of Windows you buy for every computer. Let's say it contributes $5 to the retail price. But with the Ransom model, you decide - is it worth $5 to me to have the advanced compatability set? If yes, you hand over your $5, and when the development group has been returned their $500,000, it becomes Free for everyone.
You still have the product that you decided was worth $5, except now it's Free software. You may not have decided it was worth $5, but now it's freely available, you can get the benefit, some time later. The developers were able to access the funds to this project because they were able to show how they would return the investment. This project got done where it would not have been done otherwise, because of such backing.
Re:Dogs smarter than chimps
on
The Origin of Dogs
·
· Score: 4, Informative
At least pretend to have read the article.
Puppies as young as nine weeks are as good as the adults, so it's not due to conditioning. Also, the experiment was designed so that the dogs could not use their sense of smell.
Quote: The United States has also been the only nation to successfully navigate a manned spacecraft beyond the orbit of the Earth.
I am sure the Russians were the first to have a manned flight orbit the moon. In fact, a quick web search reveals Russianspaceweb which lists at least 4 (unmanned) Russian missions that flew around the moon. The documentary that gave me this point of view put the view that since the Russians had a man around the moon earlier than expected, the American moon landing was more rushed than even JFK envisaged.
Also, the Russians weren't THAT far behind being able to land on the moon.
The wonderful thing about Slashdot is that I am sure that someone actually involved in both programmes will reply, presently.:)
Yes, but Aluminium's meltihng point of 660 degrees celsius is a LOT lower than that of steels around 1500 degrees C - the rate of heat transfer increases with the *fourth* power of the differential. (If my memory is in fact correct, it means the rate of heat transfer from molten steel to nearly boiling water is something like 80 times as great as nolten aluminium.)
It's not the fact that both are well above the boiling point of water, I guess it's the balance between how much heat is transferred to your flesh versus how much water that heat vaporises.
Unfortunately, the text book I have doesn't list latent heat of melting, but the specific heat of aluminium is 900 J/kgK, while steel has a specific heat of between 450 and 500 J/kgK. This means that once the molten metal has solidified and stuck to you, the aluminium has more heat available to transfer than suggested by the temperature alone.
I had two really sad thoughts after reading this post....
Firstly, I have been told that molten steel is hot enough that the moisture content in your skin vaporises and causes it to (mostly) skitter away from your skin, a bit like water in a hot frypan. Molten aluminium, on the other hand (pun intended!), isn't hot enough to cause this effect, and so transfers a greater proportion of its heat to your body. Despite the overall amount of heat in the aluminium being lower, the damage to you is much, much worse.
The other sad thought was the chorus from "It's raining men" changed to "It's raining mol-ten". I'll never get it out of my head now!
Yes, but Krakatoa didn't cause extinctions of species, except in the (relatively) local area. The re-population by migration is nearly instant, on a geological timesecale. I mean, you're only talking 120 years. Perhaps if we'd found that a new ecosystem consisting of previously un-evolved lifeforms had developed around Krakatoa in the last 120 years, then your point about finding the right fossils might be valid.
Worse than that, the fact that it's beidegradable also means that it's edible. The corn starch based polymers I saw when I was at Uni in Australia looked great, molded well, were cheap and strong enough. But cockraches LOVED to eat them, leaving holes like swiss cheese in the pens and golf teese that were examples. I imagine this would be a bigger problem for food packaging!
Typically, Australian's have felt that we're quite good at original research and good ideas, not so good at commercialisation. The venture capital market is far less developed in Australia than it is in the US, meaning many good ideas get "made overseas".
So, many universites have, and are encouraged to have, commercialisation arms. My old uni's is called UniSeed, which is a fairly descriptive name for it. The startup company is usually owned by the University, which is acting as a venture capital fund. When the high risk high reward phase is completed, and the company is a stable commercial venture, it's floated on the stock market.
The idea is that this leads to income streams that the Universities desperately need (much more dependent on diminishing public funding than US universites), plus a high return-on-investment from the original, non-commercial research.
Software called Kalmaker (www.kalmaker.com.au) was written that gives you access to nearly every function of GM Delco ECUs. This ecu was used on a wide variety of cars, from 2 litre 4 cylinders to 5 litre V8's.
In Australia, where the software was written, the ECU was mostly used on the Buick 3.8 V6, from 1989 to 1997.
Previously, it was available in a low cost home user version, but is now available only in workshop versions, for around US$600. ECU's themselves are also available, or can be had from wreckers. Many project cars of many and varied configurations have used the re-programmed ECU's to great effect.
However - the original author never recovered more than a fraction of his time and effort, and the right to sell Kalmaker has passed through many hands and liquidation sales. Even at prices much less than programmable ECUs, there's apparently not a large enough market to sustain such a thing.
Additionally, if you're interested in a more rational approach to car modifications, allow me to heartily recommend Autospeed. Well worth the very low cost, and there's a large number of free articles. A wider ranging Tech Journal, that should be of interest to Slashdot readers will be launched soon... I'm excited.
What's much more relevant in that BECAUSE universities are operating in the real world, the purpose of a test is to discover whether _this_ student knows (or probably knows) _this_ thing. Then, the university can award a degree that effectively says _this_ student knows _these_ things and the "real world" will have some confidence in it.
The purpose of the class, and therefore the test, was not to teach or assess the student's ability to work in a group.
That's two blatantly flippant comments from CmdrTaco today (Law's to punish software vendors is the other, for my 2c) that display the cool and hip anti-establishment attitude that really pushed my button today. Maybe I'm just having a bad day.
No comment from me on the brain-dead use or otherwise of a simple script, though.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Your example of blowing the air into a rigid container of smaller size is non-sensical...
h ybang
:)
Your point about the high speed pictures confirms that the grandparent was correct about the "bang" being produced by the latex and not the expanding air. I was wrong about this.
There's a very nice explanation of the physics here:
http://www.balloonhq.com/faq/howpop.html#w
However, the air *is* compressed inside the balloon. By exactly the amount required to strain the latex. At least you've had the decency to say so, as well!
He would not be convinced that the pressure inside the balloon is equal to the pressure inside plus the pressure required to elastically deform the latex, and that the energy released when a balloon was popped was a demonstration of this stored energy.
At least you have the decency to contradict yourself:
You what? I think you need to re-enrol in Materials Selection 101.
Maybe if you're talking specific strength (strengh to weight), but otherwise there is no condition (torsional, longitudinal or transverse)where a solid bar would be weaker than a hollow bar*.
*Excluding strange situations where inertial loading becomes significant!
If I reduce my spending on other items, I have reduced my "standard of living". This is how I pay for the more expensive car - it's just shuffling the cost of my decision around diffently, but it's still a cost.
:)
Have you ever calculated how many kilometres you need to drive in an old, gas guzzling pollution spewing tank to equal the pollution production of a new car? Last time I did it, it was about double the average lifetime distance of a car. So, the best thing for the environment is to keep driving the old car.
The chain of ownership as the car is passed on is a zero sum game, environmentally - the newest car effectively replaces the oldest car in the fleet - which I think you implied in your post, but I wanted to clarify it. I wonder about the transaction costs though - the more transactions made, the more used car salesmen are supported. They have a negative effect on the environment, just like the rest of us, and surely most people would agree that fewer used car salesmen are a good thing!
"So?" I hear you say? Those used care salemen would still exist, doing something else, still hurting the environment, just like the rest of us. Well, not necessarily. Either we could maintain our current standard of living with fewer people, thereby reducing our impact on the environment, or we could have a higher standard of living with the same number of people by re-employing those used car salesmen elsewhere. Thereby allowing us to choose the more expensive efficient car and have the same standard of living.
And the circle is closed
Oh, and sure - if you must replace your car anyway, then it's time to make the best choice you can.
Extremists depend on power bases of "bigoted/ignorant/stupid/closed-minded" people. Australia's compulsory voting means that the centrist, apathetic majority has to at least choose the "least worst" option every few years, moderating the more opiniated extremists at both ends of the spectrum.
Australian (Federal) politics over the last two decades in particular has been a race to claim the centre, hoping to push the other side towards their extremist powerbases. The US Presidential race seems (from afar) to be mostly about shoring up your support within your existing camp.
In order to save 50% on the cost of hanging power lines, and 50% of power loss through the lines, the electric potential in power lines is relative to earth - effectively the Earth is used as the return circuit.
Which has the unfortunate side effect that you can be electrocuted between active and the Earth (i.e. touching a single wire) rather than having to touch two wires simultaneously with different hands... but it appears to be worth it.
Presumably high voltage line pairs aren't doing something tricky with the phase of the power to give the effect you describe... because no-one thought HV had any effect. Until now.
50 UK pounds ~ $125 AUD. Steel (coil) costs around $1/kilogram in bulk. A 1250kg car is about 50% steel/iron, so you're at around $625, or 250 UK pounds already. Give or take.
Then you need to add the glass, aluminium, plastic, copper, brass, and everything else.
The last line seems to infer that the cost of a car is driven only by profiteering. Perhaps in response to economic factors such as poor supply and high demand? Not true - nearly every market segment is crowded with makes and models. Supply is very competitive.
The amount of investment required to deliver the amount of processing and technology in the average econobox is simply staggering. The quality and delivery demands are much higher than many other industries, but also go hand in hand with very high liabilities.
As an engineer for a Tier 1 supplier, it astounds me that cars are so damn cheap!
One type salt = Bad
Many type of salts = Good
Ergo:
One alcohol type = Bad
Lager, Pilsener, Stout, Scotch and Gin = Good.
Honest, officer.
I just pulled $100 out of the ATM yesterday - the years are 96,97,98,02,02. So it seems like they print every year. :)
However, I thought when I removed them from the ATM that they were brand new notes, and wouldn't have been surprised to see them have sequential serial numbers. Now that's impressive!
I don't understand why the US still uses bills all the same colour and all the same size.... and paper no less!
My uncle had a Compaq "Portable", back in the day. It was the size of a suitcase, and the full size keyboard folded up over the 6 inch monitor and floppy drives. I believe he still has it somewhere.
Oh, and just last week the test engineer at work was watching an automotive crash test video on an indutrial pc - think mini tower with lcd screen on the side and keyboard integrated into the cover.
Hardly unique!
Abstract thought != Language
I have a step sister who is deaf and brain damaged from birth. She can certainly speak a language, sign language. And yes, she is certainly human - she has feelings, and a personality.
However, her capacity for abstract thought is limited. Just because she doesn't speak of the future beyond her next birthday party (which is always "next month") doesn't mean she doesn't have a language.
And to make the trivial point - at some point the meerkats expressed a new concept - "human". It doesn't matter which arrived last, the humans or the meerkats or the language, there was time when there was no understanding of the sound for human, and now there is.
Personally, I've found it very interesting to look at the social, political and economic conditions that caused these "lean manufacturing" ideologies to develop in Japan first. The best explanation I've heard so far is that during the American occupation of Japan after WW2, many labor laws and conditions were put in place, making the HR environment very different. This combined with cultural differences and a need to develop very good manufacturing and assembly industries because of Japan's (supposed - I haven't checked for myself) low level of mineral resources and more compact manufacturing facilites to drive this development.
In effect, raw material, manpower and space became much more expensive than in the Western world. This meant that higher levels of automation and more emphasis on waste reduction could be justified.
So, a set of advanced manufacturing ideologies evolved to suit the prevailing conditions. The ideologies are expanding, displacing the old ideologies in the western manufacturing world, especially in the automotive sector. You can thank this for the vastly increased quality and rapid technology advance in many modern cars.
But when someone comes to you with that look in their eye and says "We need to implement 5S to save the company!", I believe it pays to look at these techniques through OUR eyes. For us, it may well be more prudent to build a larger factory. Or lay off workers in the tough times - the inflexibility of the Japanese labour market has been blamed for keeping Japan's economic growth stunted for the last decade or so.
Slavish adherance to any ideology is bad..... is that what makes things become "-isms"?
I find the two prevailing attitudes in most of these posts really disturbing.
Not doing unpleasant chores for your family, like Windows support - I mean, they are your family ferchrissakes.
Second, the idea that you can be a programmer/linux/mainframe person and know nothing about PC's. The parent of the this post is the most reasonable attempt at explanation of the lot. However, with an education, a developed analytical reasoning ability, lack of fear about items technological and an understanding of the principles of operation, there shouldn't be many problems most of your family could have that you could not assist with.
Yes, you SHOULD be able to find the networking configuration of any GUI OS, for example. You SHOULD be able to take in the available information, formulate a theory, test the hypothesis and observe the results. You SHOULD be able to use whatever experience you do have, even if the situation is one you have not previously encountered.
Unless of course you're a reasonably bright kid who was into computers early and skipped a proper unversity education to catch the IT boom and are now looking down the barrel of 40 years in a mature industry with no qualifications and no learning skills with which to update your specific technical knowledge.
And no family who feel the need to support you when you need help.
There's a lot of problems with the above post!
First, let's get the nitpick out of the way: Why do you call someone starting a new software project "deviant"? "Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software." Surely this also includes the freedom to fork or start new projects.
Next, the vaporware point - there are two counter-arguments here. If you don't like giving money to vaporware, don't! Support released projects, if you feel it's worth it. Also, the page linked to in the article specifically mentions: "Details: In short, Authors (the programmers of the software) first publish their work under a Ransom License (a special proprietary license)." (My italics.) It's not about paying for vaporware, it's about buying software if you think it's a worthwhile investment, with the possibility that it may become Free in the future, with all the associated benefits.
I believe that this model may be suitable for a great number of projects. I am sure many people's gripe with Microsoft, RIAA et al is not that they sell their digital information as a commercial product, which we can choose to buy or ignore, but that the business model they use does not reflect the real costs. It costs a lot of money to design, code, and market a product, but then it's cheap to duplicate that product. Trouble is, we are made to pay for these items long after the amortised cost of development has been returned - hence the astronomical profits of some successful companies.
These factors apply at different scales to many different products - and some scales are currently out of reach for Free Software. The principle is that it does take an investment of time and money to do some things (whether you personally think they should be done that way or not), and that this method may be a good way to gain a reasonable return on that investment without locking the product into a higher price in perpetuity than necessary.
Yes, it's similar to copyright - you get a limited time to exploit a body of work in order to realise a return, but then it's available for The Public Good. Do you think a non-profit organisation could have made the LOTR trilogy without being able to deliver some commercial benefit to its backers? How cool would it be, now that it has made millions for the studio, if legitimate high quality digital copies were available for the cost of making the DVD?
I'll finish (finally) with an example - a group of programmers would like to create an advanced compatibility driver set for GNU/Linux, to match or beat the drivers already available for Windows, for a large range of hardware. However, to buy one of each piece of hardware for testing, to look at the detailed product documentation (which is all freely supplied by hardware makers, naturally), to write the drivers, test them, to have somewhere to do it, and to publish them will take money. Say, $500,000 - even if the programmer's time is gratis. More if they need to eat and/or sleep. With Windows, you pay for that cost, a real cost, in every copy of Windows you buy for every computer. Let's say it contributes $5 to the retail price. But with the Ransom model, you decide - is it worth $5 to me to have the advanced compatability set? If yes, you hand over your $5, and when the development group has been returned their $500,000, it becomes Free for everyone.
You still have the product that you decided was worth $5, except now it's Free software.
You may not have decided it was worth $5, but now it's freely available, you can get the benefit, some time later.
The developers were able to access the funds to this project because they were able to show how they would return the investment.
This project got done where it would not have been done otherwise, because of such backing.
At least pretend to have read the article.
Puppies as young as nine weeks are as good as the adults, so it's not due to conditioning. Also, the experiment was designed so that the dogs could not use their sense of smell.
Oh wait.... I think I've just been trolled!
Also, the Russians weren't THAT far behind being able to land on the moon.
The wonderful thing about Slashdot is that I am sure that someone actually involved in both programmes will reply, presently.
Yes, but Aluminium's meltihng point of 660 degrees celsius is a LOT lower than that of steels around 1500 degrees C - the rate of heat transfer increases with the *fourth* power of the differential. (If my memory is in fact correct, it means the rate of heat transfer from molten steel to nearly boiling water is something like 80 times as great as nolten aluminium.)
It's not the fact that both are well above the boiling point of water, I guess it's the balance between how much heat is transferred to your flesh versus how much water that heat vaporises.
Unfortunately, the text book I have doesn't list latent heat of melting, but the specific heat of aluminium is 900 J/kgK, while steel has a specific heat of between 450 and 500 J/kgK. This means that once the molten metal has solidified and stuck to you, the aluminium has more heat available to transfer than suggested by the temperature alone.
I had two really sad thoughts after reading this post....
Firstly, I have been told that molten steel is hot enough that the moisture content in your skin vaporises and causes it to (mostly) skitter away from your skin, a bit like water in a hot frypan. Molten aluminium, on the other hand (pun intended!), isn't hot enough to cause this effect, and so transfers a greater proportion of its heat to your body. Despite the overall amount of heat in the aluminium being lower, the damage to you is much, much worse.
The other sad thought was the chorus from "It's raining men" changed to "It's raining mol-ten". I'll never get it out of my head now!
Yes, but Krakatoa didn't cause extinctions of species, except in the (relatively) local area. The re-population by migration is nearly instant, on a geological timesecale. I mean, you're only talking 120 years. Perhaps if we'd found that a new ecosystem consisting of previously un-evolved lifeforms had developed around Krakatoa in the last 120 years, then your point about finding the right fossils might be valid.
Worse than that, the fact that it's beidegradable also means that it's edible. The corn starch based polymers I saw when I was at Uni in Australia looked great, molded well, were cheap and strong enough. But cockraches LOVED to eat them, leaving holes like swiss cheese in the pens and golf teese that were examples. I imagine this would be a bigger problem for food packaging!
Typically, Australian's have felt that we're quite good at original research and good ideas, not so good at commercialisation. The venture capital market is far less developed in Australia than it is in the US, meaning many good ideas get "made overseas".
So, many universites have, and are encouraged to have, commercialisation arms. My old uni's is called UniSeed, which is a fairly descriptive name for it. The startup company is usually owned by the University, which is acting as a venture capital fund. When the high risk high reward phase is completed, and the company is a stable commercial venture, it's floated on the stock market.
The idea is that this leads to income streams that the Universities desperately need (much more dependent on diminishing public funding than US universites), plus a high return-on-investment from the original, non-commercial research.
There was such a thing!
Software called Kalmaker (www.kalmaker.com.au) was written that gives you access to nearly every function of GM Delco ECUs. This ecu was used on a wide variety of cars, from 2 litre 4 cylinders to 5 litre V8's.
In Australia, where the software was written, the ECU was mostly used on the Buick 3.8 V6, from 1989 to 1997.
Previously, it was available in a low cost home user version, but is now available only in workshop versions, for around US$600. ECU's themselves are also available, or can be had from wreckers. Many project cars of many and varied configurations have used the re-programmed ECU's to great effect.
However - the original author never recovered more than a fraction of his time and effort, and the right to sell Kalmaker has passed through many hands and liquidation sales. Even at prices much less than programmable ECUs, there's apparently not a large enough market to sustain such a thing.
Additionally, if you're interested in a more rational approach to car modifications, allow me to heartily recommend Autospeed. Well worth the very low cost, and there's a large number of free articles. A wider ranging Tech Journal, that should be of interest to Slashdot readers will be launched soon... I'm excited.
What's much more relevant in that BECAUSE universities are operating in the real world, the purpose of a test is to discover whether _this_ student knows (or probably knows) _this_ thing. Then, the university can award a degree that effectively says _this_ student knows _these_ things and the "real world" will have some confidence in it.
:)
The purpose of the class, and therefore the test, was not to teach or assess the student's ability to work in a group.
That's two blatantly flippant comments from CmdrTaco today (Law's to punish software vendors is the other, for my 2c) that display the cool and hip anti-establishment attitude that really pushed my button today. Maybe I'm just having a bad day.
No comment from me on the brain-dead use or otherwise of a simple script, though.
And if I had a pencil and paper I too could scribble some guff about E=MC^2 upon it in short order.
You said it yourself - it's not the volume of writing that's publishable, it's the insight (and the evidence).