That stuff is *still* important, for every PC sold with gigs of RAM, hundreds of microcontroller-based devices are sold, where register use matters, where memory use matters, where each clock cycle matters. For instance, take the ATtiny16 microcontroller: an 8 bit "system on a chip" with 1K of flash ROM and 64 *bytes* of RAM. Yet C is a useful and productive language to write code for such a device.
"Tiny" nuclear reactors can be as small as 9 inches by 16 inches, as in the SNAP-10 used to power a spacecraft in the 1960s (this was a full-fledged nuclear reactor, not an RTG). Much much smaller than a hot tub.
For trains, it depends where you are. In most of Europe the trains run off electricity. It's an uncommon sight in the United States so you may not be all that familiar with it, but in most of Europe many passenger and frieght lines have cables suspended above them, and the locomotive picks up the power from the overhead wire. In France you can say effectively the railway is mostly nuclear powered.
It has resulted in some extremely fast trains, for example the Spanish AVE can travel up to 320 km/h in normal service (200 mph).
In this photo you can see the pantograph on the locomotive and the overhead wires:
For part 103 (ultralights) they don't care what it's powered by.
For certified aircraft, the installation needs to be certified. They don't specify by which technology. If someone gets a motor/power controller/airframe combination certified, then it's certified.
For aircraft that are "experimental" (in other words, any homebuilt - the name "experimental" is a bit of a misnomer, for example the Vans RV series is very well proven and not the least bit experimental) you can power it with whatever you like.
A Mac is a PC with training wheels you can't take off? I'm sorry, but OS 9 was discontinued more than 10 years ago now. OS X is BSD-flavoured UNIX and the UI is a direct descendent of NeXTstep. Unless you now want to argue that UNIX is training wheels you can't take off (and I don't think anyone will do that).
You've got all the stuff that Linux users have the moment you open Terminal.app, but in addition to that a very nice slick and usable user interface. Unlike a Windows desktop PC, the Mac ships with many good scripting tools and command line utilities and the XCode IDE comes in the box if you want to install it.
You're comparing apples with oranges: TNT releases that energy in a very small fraction of a second. However, a lithium battery when it catches fire takes a minute or two to actually burn out, so unlike TNT it won't explode, it'll just burn. Petrol (gasoline) burns much more rapidly and ferociously than a Li-Ion battery. Also liquid fuels can spread out while they are burning and catch a lot of other things on fire, a lithium battery tends to sit and flare off in one place. It's considerably less threatening than a liquid fuel fire.
A lithium battery probably makes a better weapon by blunt impact rather than burning.
I'd love to get hold of a C5 (unfortunately, they are all now collectors items) and re-motor it with a modern brushless motor (something like the Scorpion HK-4025 650kv that I use in my T-Rex 600 RC helicopter, the motor itself has a maximum of 2.6kW and easily fits in the hand - it's small) and ESC, and use a bank of Li-Poly batteries (which would end up being much smaller and lighter than the original lead-acid). Unlike in my heli, the motor wouldn't be really running all that hard (but would have plenty of reserve to get up hills).
Since everyone will be confused about whether Scotland is a country or not, whether it's part of England or not or something called Great Britain or the United Kingdom, here is a video that explains Britain, the United Kingdom, Scotland etc.
The European Union does not change national status. Each of the members of the EU is a soverign nation, complete with passports, Internet country codes etc. and all the trappings of sovereignty. Being an EU member doesn't mean you stop being a nation. There is no United States of Europe, there is no European Union passport. Only passports of the sovereign nations that make up the EU.
Scotland is not a sovereign nation, it makes up part of a nation, and the sovereign nation of which it makes a part is called the United Kingdom. Scotland stopped being a nation as soon as it was absorbed into the United Kingdom. You can't get a Scottish passport.
There are of course people in Scotland who want it to become a sovereign nation again, and if Scotland achieves this presumably it will be a member of the EU, which will not change its status as a sovereign nation.
While I think the Space Shuttle was perhaps not the best way of achieving the last 30 years of US manned spaceflight... it does sound like you know the cost of everything but the value of nothing. A programme like the Shuttle should not be measured purely on tangible profit and loss, there's more to it than that.
The very first, Columbia, when I was a child at a friend's house. The very last, today's launch.
All the others I've only seen after the fact. I did watch a re-entry live in person once from a Cessna 172 at about 11,000 feet over the north of Houston at night. It left a plasma trail across the sky from horizon to horizon. It was funny to think when we got back to Houston Gulf airport (formerly called Spaceland, hence its identifier KSPX, sadly now demolished and covered in identikit McMansions) only 40 or so miles away, the shuttle crew had already landed in Florida, disembarked, and were probably halfway though their first cup of coffee.
"Learning a language takes a lot of time and effort, and if you're past your early 20s you probably won't ever be a fluent speaker no matter how much you put into it"
While this may be true of Chinese due to the huge difference between Chinese and Indo-European languages (not to mention the problems of the bizarre Chinese writing system, meaning it's hard to near impossible to get started with the written word) generally, this meme that you can't be good at a language if you learn it after your early 20s is, I think, hogwash - and generally just an excuse made by English speakers to not bother learning another language.
I'm 39. I started learning Spanish 3 years ago. Already I can think in Spanish, speak and understand it well enough that I can watch Spanish TV and understand it, have a conversation in a noisy bar and understand it, and write it better than many Spanish people can write their own language. I'm confident that if I could spend 6 months in Spain, I'd be pretty much fluent in speaking, too. That's not to say I wouldn't have an obvious accent (I can't even do impressions of other English accents, so being able to speak a foreign language with no accent = no chance). Only 14 months after starting learning Spanish, I gave a talk in Spanish in Spain, and people could understand me. Something, according to the naysayers, that is only possible if you are under 20.
The reason why English speakers don't learn languages well has everything to do with the terrible way we are taught languages in Britain and the United States (in other words, in a dull, uninteresting and unintuitive manner, usually being taught in English so we think in English and translate which is a complete non-starter - language learning should be easy and fun, after all, picking up language is a basic function of being a human - but we make it difficult and dull as dishwater) and absolutely zero to do with our language learning ability *or* our age. If you think "oh, I'm over 20, I have no chance of being fluent", guess what - when you give up before you even start it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I was just in Holland. Our host spoke 4 languages well - English (with barely an accent), French (his native language), Dutch and German. He also spoke some Spanish.
If you live in the low countries you DO get to use those languages every day. What also helps is that Dutch, German and English share enough common heritage that if you know one it becomes much easier to learn one of the others. French and Spanish have enough common heritage that learning one is a massive help in learning the other.
If you don't use a language for a while, picking it up again is vastly faster and easier than learning it from scratch. So a Dutch person who learned German well at school, then didn't use it for 10 years but had a need to live in Germany would pick German back up again very quickly, in a small fraction of the time it would need to start from scratch.
The problem with Chinese is just it's such an awful language, with a bizarre and retarded method of writing it down which just makes it incredibly hard to learn. I suspect the Chinese will end up learning English, not English speakers learning Chinese.
But it's those very senior officials who want things like Sinde's law (a highly illiberal law to shut down any website suspected of copyright infringement with little judicial oversight).
The SGAE is an emergent property of the people it is made up of, organizations only do things the people within them do. The very same people ripping off the artists (which is what embezzling SGAE funds is doing) are the very same people pushing for things like Sinde's law.
How many tonnes of coal does it need to run a typical house from a coal-powered power station? Unlike the coal, the salt doesn't get used up; with coal you keep having to add more and more.
Gliders don't have a practical purpose, but we make them and make them big enough to put one or two people in, and there are a lot of them around. There are people who just want to fly for fun.
It's irrelevant. The OP mentioned a horse chewing on the white house lawn, a building for a prominent Republic of Ireland person. Northern Ireland is a completely different country, and therefore it may be that horses are not allowed to chew on the lawn of (say) Stormont.
No, the modern way to build PCBs at home is to home etch. The modern way to build PCBs not at home is to send CAD files to China.
Occasionally I make 2-layer boards at home. The usual technique is to use laser printer toner transfer (use a CAD program, not a "Windows only wannabe CAD program", but gEDA (GPL EDA) which was designed for Unix, and is a set of tools such as gschem (schematic capture) gnetlist, PCB, etc. Shiny inkjet paper is used to print the PCB layout and then a clothes iron (or a laminator) is used to transfer the toner onto the bare copper clad board, it's then etched in your favorite etchant (I use ferric), tinned and drilled. You can also get fancy laser printer toner "paper" (I've never used it) which is a bit easier to use for toner transfer, but it's expensive.
Some people have modified inkjet printers to directly print etch resist onto copper board. I don't make enough boards at home to justify doing that. There are also reasonably low cost CNC machines for milling PCBs if you're making them regularly. Some brave souls have made 4 layer boards at home, but that's just too much effort, I'd rather just pay the likes of Advanced Circuits or PCB-CART for something like that...
When I send PCBs away to be made in a factory I use the same toolchain since gEDA PCB emits an industry standard Gerber file.
My guess is that they are using oAuth. Unfortunately, oAuth appears to be completely retarded in this respect (or at least the way it's being implemented) needing a secret key embedded in an application. Open source or closed source, that key can be recovered; the best you can do is obfuscate it but that will only last so long if a spammer wants the key from a legitimate application.
The UK reprocesses spent fuel so there's a lot less waste to start off with.
In any case, too much CO2 in the air remains harmful for thousands of years. However, the nuclear waste is all in a concentrated, known location instead of being spread around the world resulting in a global problem.
Helicopter: engine quits, it can glide (autorotate) to a landing that most of the time is successful, and nearly all of the time doesn't kill anyone.
Fixed wing: engine quits, it can glide to a landing that most of the time is successful and nearly all of the time doesn't kill anyone.
Both small fixed wing and helicopters have simple mechanical controls that are very reliable, and quite often the failure of one of these controls results in a brown-pants moment for the pilot but the aircraft can still be controlled to a landing.
This doesn't look like it has that capability, and in addition requires electronic controls, so any failure = fall out of the sky. Of course, for small aircraft based on this concept, a ballistic full-airframe parachute may be used so in most cases the landing can be survived without serious injury, but ballistic chutes don't really scale all that well. With that it doesn't seem like a disruptive technology - perhaps a disruptive technology for small aircraft that can carry a ballistic chute or unmanned aircraft that don't fly over populated areas, but that's pretty restrictive compared to the different kinds of helicopter you can make, so I don't see helicopters nor fixed wing going away any time soon. That's not to say that if this turns out to be practical it won't be very useful, just that it's not really a disruptive technology if it requires a ballistic chute to not kill anyone if there's a computer or engine failure because this seriously limits the chances of it ever being a certified aircraft by any aviation authority in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
That stuff is *still* important, for every PC sold with gigs of RAM, hundreds of microcontroller-based devices are sold, where register use matters, where memory use matters, where each clock cycle matters. For instance, take the ATtiny16 microcontroller: an 8 bit "system on a chip" with 1K of flash ROM and 64 *bytes* of RAM. Yet C is a useful and productive language to write code for such a device.
"Tiny" nuclear reactors can be as small as 9 inches by 16 inches, as in the SNAP-10 used to power a spacecraft in the 1960s (this was a full-fledged nuclear reactor, not an RTG). Much much smaller than a hot tub.
It seems to go onto prove the old adage "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission"
However, in the context of radioactive materials, it might not be wise...
For trains, it depends where you are. In most of Europe the trains run off electricity. It's an uncommon sight in the United States so you may not be all that familiar with it, but in most of Europe many passenger and frieght lines have cables suspended above them, and the locomotive picks up the power from the overhead wire. In France you can say effectively the railway is mostly nuclear powered.
It has resulted in some extremely fast trains, for example the Spanish AVE can travel up to 320 km/h in normal service (200 mph).
In this photo you can see the pantograph on the locomotive and the overhead wires:
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo:Renfe_clase_100.JPG
For part 103 (ultralights) they don't care what it's powered by.
For certified aircraft, the installation needs to be certified. They don't specify by which technology. If someone gets a motor/power controller/airframe combination certified, then it's certified.
For aircraft that are "experimental" (in other words, any homebuilt - the name "experimental" is a bit of a misnomer, for example the Vans RV series is very well proven and not the least bit experimental) you can power it with whatever you like.
For years I always thought that line was "Dispatch Warlock and Ajax, to bring back their bodies"...
A Mac is a PC with training wheels you can't take off? I'm sorry, but OS 9 was discontinued more than 10 years ago now. OS X is BSD-flavoured UNIX and the UI is a direct descendent of NeXTstep. Unless you now want to argue that UNIX is training wheels you can't take off (and I don't think anyone will do that).
You've got all the stuff that Linux users have the moment you open Terminal.app, but in addition to that a very nice slick and usable user interface. Unlike a Windows desktop PC, the Mac ships with many good scripting tools and command line utilities and the XCode IDE comes in the box if you want to install it.
You're comparing apples with oranges: TNT releases that energy in a very small fraction of a second. However, a lithium battery when it catches fire takes a minute or two to actually burn out, so unlike TNT it won't explode, it'll just burn. Petrol (gasoline) burns much more rapidly and ferociously than a Li-Ion battery. Also liquid fuels can spread out while they are burning and catch a lot of other things on fire, a lithium battery tends to sit and flare off in one place. It's considerably less threatening than a liquid fuel fire.
A lithium battery probably makes a better weapon by blunt impact rather than burning.
I'd love to get hold of a C5 (unfortunately, they are all now collectors items) and re-motor it with a modern brushless motor (something like the Scorpion HK-4025 650kv that I use in my T-Rex 600 RC helicopter, the motor itself has a maximum of 2.6kW and easily fits in the hand - it's small) and ESC, and use a bank of Li-Poly batteries (which would end up being much smaller and lighter than the original lead-acid). Unlike in my heli, the motor wouldn't be really running all that hard (but would have plenty of reserve to get up hills).
Since everyone will be confused about whether Scotland is a country or not, whether it's part of England or not or something called Great Britain or the United Kingdom, here is a video that explains Britain, the United Kingdom, Scotland etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10
The European Union does not change national status. Each of the members of the EU is a soverign nation, complete with passports, Internet country codes etc. and all the trappings of sovereignty. Being an EU member doesn't mean you stop being a nation. There is no United States of Europe, there is no European Union passport. Only passports of the sovereign nations that make up the EU.
Scotland is not a sovereign nation, it makes up part of a nation, and the sovereign nation of which it makes a part is called the United Kingdom. Scotland stopped being a nation as soon as it was absorbed into the United Kingdom. You can't get a Scottish passport.
There are of course people in Scotland who want it to become a sovereign nation again, and if Scotland achieves this presumably it will be a member of the EU, which will not change its status as a sovereign nation.
While I think the Space Shuttle was perhaps not the best way of achieving the last 30 years of US manned spaceflight... it does sound like you know the cost of everything but the value of nothing. A programme like the Shuttle should not be measured purely on tangible profit and loss, there's more to it than that.
I've watched two shuttle launches live:
The very first, Columbia, when I was a child at a friend's house.
The very last, today's launch.
All the others I've only seen after the fact. I did watch a re-entry live in person once from a Cessna 172 at about 11,000 feet over the north of Houston at night. It left a plasma trail across the sky from horizon to horizon. It was funny to think when we got back to Houston Gulf airport (formerly called Spaceland, hence its identifier KSPX, sadly now demolished and covered in identikit McMansions) only 40 or so miles away, the shuttle crew had already landed in Florida, disembarked, and were probably halfway though their first cup of coffee.
"Learning a language takes a lot of time and effort, and if you're past your early 20s you probably won't ever be a fluent speaker no matter how much you put into it"
While this may be true of Chinese due to the huge difference between Chinese and Indo-European languages (not to mention the problems of the bizarre Chinese writing system, meaning it's hard to near impossible to get started with the written word) generally, this meme that you can't be good at a language if you learn it after your early 20s is, I think, hogwash - and generally just an excuse made by English speakers to not bother learning another language.
I'm 39. I started learning Spanish 3 years ago. Already I can think in Spanish, speak and understand it well enough that I can watch Spanish TV and understand it, have a conversation in a noisy bar and understand it, and write it better than many Spanish people can write their own language. I'm confident that if I could spend 6 months in Spain, I'd be pretty much fluent in speaking, too. That's not to say I wouldn't have an obvious accent (I can't even do impressions of other English accents, so being able to speak a foreign language with no accent = no chance). Only 14 months after starting learning Spanish, I gave a talk in Spanish in Spain, and people could understand me. Something, according to the naysayers, that is only possible if you are under 20.
The reason why English speakers don't learn languages well has everything to do with the terrible way we are taught languages in Britain and the United States (in other words, in a dull, uninteresting and unintuitive manner, usually being taught in English so we think in English and translate which is a complete non-starter - language learning should be easy and fun, after all, picking up language is a basic function of being a human - but we make it difficult and dull as dishwater) and absolutely zero to do with our language learning ability *or* our age. If you think "oh, I'm over 20, I have no chance of being fluent", guess what - when you give up before you even start it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I was just in Holland. Our host spoke 4 languages well - English (with barely an accent), French (his native language), Dutch and German. He also spoke some Spanish.
If you live in the low countries you DO get to use those languages every day. What also helps is that Dutch, German and English share enough common heritage that if you know one it becomes much easier to learn one of the others. French and Spanish have enough common heritage that learning one is a massive help in learning the other.
If you don't use a language for a while, picking it up again is vastly faster and easier than learning it from scratch. So a Dutch person who learned German well at school, then didn't use it for 10 years but had a need to live in Germany would pick German back up again very quickly, in a small fraction of the time it would need to start from scratch.
The problem with Chinese is just it's such an awful language, with a bizarre and retarded method of writing it down which just makes it incredibly hard to learn. I suspect the Chinese will end up learning English, not English speakers learning Chinese.
But it's those very senior officials who want things like Sinde's law (a highly illiberal law to shut down any website suspected of copyright infringement with little judicial oversight).
The SGAE is an emergent property of the people it is made up of, organizations only do things the people within them do. The very same people ripping off the artists (which is what embezzling SGAE funds is doing) are the very same people pushing for things like Sinde's law.
How many tonnes of coal does it need to run a typical house from a coal-powered power station? Unlike the coal, the salt doesn't get used up; with coal you keep having to add more and more.
Sorry to be a grammar and spelling nazi:
It is "all intents and purposes", not "all intensive purposes"
"you don't loose functionality" - You meant "lose" not "loose". Loose means something entirely different to lose.
HTH, HAND.
The motivation need only be "because it's fun".
Gliders don't have a practical purpose, but we make them and make them big enough to put one or two people in, and there are a lot of them around. There are people who just want to fly for fun.
I've used PCB Cart. I've never had a single board fail.
It's irrelevant. The OP mentioned a horse chewing on the white house lawn, a building for a prominent Republic of Ireland person. Northern Ireland is a completely different country, and therefore it may be that horses are not allowed to chew on the lawn of (say) Stormont.
No, the modern way to build PCBs at home is to home etch. The modern way to build PCBs not at home is to send CAD files to China.
Occasionally I make 2-layer boards at home. The usual technique is to use laser printer toner transfer (use a CAD program, not a "Windows only wannabe CAD program", but gEDA (GPL EDA) which was designed for Unix, and is a set of tools such as gschem (schematic capture) gnetlist, PCB, etc. Shiny inkjet paper is used to print the PCB layout and then a clothes iron (or a laminator) is used to transfer the toner onto the bare copper clad board, it's then etched in your favorite etchant (I use ferric), tinned and drilled. You can also get fancy laser printer toner "paper" (I've never used it) which is a bit easier to use for toner transfer, but it's expensive.
Some people have modified inkjet printers to directly print etch resist onto copper board. I don't make enough boards at home to justify doing that. There are also reasonably low cost CNC machines for milling PCBs if you're making them regularly. Some brave souls have made 4 layer boards at home, but that's just too much effort, I'd rather just pay the likes of Advanced Circuits or PCB-CART for something like that...
When I send PCBs away to be made in a factory I use the same toolchain since gEDA PCB emits an industry standard Gerber file.
My guess is that they are using oAuth. Unfortunately, oAuth appears to be completely retarded in this respect (or at least the way it's being implemented) needing a secret key embedded in an application. Open source or closed source, that key can be recovered; the best you can do is obfuscate it but that will only last so long if a spammer wants the key from a legitimate application.
The UK reprocesses spent fuel so there's a lot less waste to start off with.
In any case, too much CO2 in the air remains harmful for thousands of years. However, the nuclear waste is all in a concentrated, known location instead of being spread around the world resulting in a global problem.
The issue I see here is this:
Helicopter: engine quits, it can glide (autorotate) to a landing that most of the time is successful, and nearly all of the time doesn't kill anyone.
Fixed wing: engine quits, it can glide to a landing that most of the time is successful and nearly all of the time doesn't kill anyone.
Both small fixed wing and helicopters have simple mechanical controls that are very reliable, and quite often the failure of one of these controls results in a brown-pants moment for the pilot but the aircraft can still be controlled to a landing.
This doesn't look like it has that capability, and in addition requires electronic controls, so any failure = fall out of the sky. Of course, for small aircraft based on this concept, a ballistic full-airframe parachute may be used so in most cases the landing can be survived without serious injury, but ballistic chutes don't really scale all that well. With that it doesn't seem like a disruptive technology - perhaps a disruptive technology for small aircraft that can carry a ballistic chute or unmanned aircraft that don't fly over populated areas, but that's pretty restrictive compared to the different kinds of helicopter you can make, so I don't see helicopters nor fixed wing going away any time soon. That's not to say that if this turns out to be practical it won't be very useful, just that it's not really a disruptive technology if it requires a ballistic chute to not kill anyone if there's a computer or engine failure because this seriously limits the chances of it ever being a certified aircraft by any aviation authority in the world.