I work in the mining industry, and thanks the post 9/11 homeland security laws, you must pass a background check and be a US Citizen or hold a valid green card in order to handle explosives.
I agree totally, I can't read or do desk work without some sort of "natural" light to soften the flickering from fluorescent lights....if I try to work with just fluorescent lighting it gives me brutal headaches...
My dad is back teaching in a southern Colorado highschool after a 15 year break...the big things he complains about are:
1) No real disipline....students are disruptive and can pretty much do anything (non-violent) that they please because the school district fears lawsuits.
2) Actual teaching becomes secondary because of the babysitting requirements.
3) What actual teaching is done is totally scripted by the administration (the teachers have a very narrow guideline to follow) and basically amounts to programming for the standardized proficiency exams.
4) All the students are treated as if they are university-bound. He feels that this leads to a swiss-army approach that does a marginal job at best.
My personal experience coming out of the same school in 1992 and going directly into an engineering program is that I was not prepared academically or mentally for what I ran into at Colorado School of Mines. Looking back at it now I wish I had worked several years (or done military service) before ever considering engineering, and considering what a job that school was doing then, I would have better off dropping out at 16 and working and getting a GED....the education (or lack thereof) would have been the same and I would have had at least some money and life experience under my belt before tackling engineering....
One big economic reason I know of that is against burying transmission lines underground is heat. The heat created from current flow is not dissipated as easily, creating and more heat and higher resistance due to the heat....This requires larger cables at higher cost, so you have two effects going against you right off....resistance losses, and cable costs. When you add in the labor involved and all of the other odds and ends the economics drive everything towards overhead lines.
It explains why Hydrogen released into the atmosphere is a bad thing.....unless we are a lot more careful with H2 than we are with every other fuel we use today, we will be making matters worse, and that isn't counting the fact that the technology still isn't up to speed to make the entire process efficient. A hydrogen economy requires that you produce it, currently from natural gas or water, store/transport it, then feed it to a fuel cell. Right now, the only way to produce Hydrogen without releasing CO2 is to crack water with clean electricity from solar/wind/hydro/nuke power...The fuel cells are delicate, expensive to manufacture, and require expensive materials that have to be mined (OMG he said the M word). Platnium is $800+ an ounce these days....people will be jacking your hydrogen car just to tear apart the fuel cell for the Pt in it......
This whole thing is a waste of our money, the technology is not there, and the advantages don't come close to breaking even with the disadvantages...we need to concentrate on making vehicles more efficient, and start looking seriously at changing power generation world wide over to nuclear or finding a way to sequester the CO2 produced by powerplants.....I think the money being pissed away on hydrogen cars would be a lot better spent on fusion research.....why not spend the cash to recover some helium3 off of the moon for fusion testing....
More than anything I think the goverment supporting Hydrogen research is a way for them to go through the motions, while they line their pockets with more money from Big Oil and Big Coal...and I am talking Everyone in DC, not just the current admin.....
.....it is called a pistol lanyard....swat teams and special ops troops often use them on their sidearms....picture a bicycle cable lock for a pistol, they can be coiled strong elastic cord or coated steel cable connected to the butt of the pistol and the users belt, just long enough that the user can extend the pistol out to arms length.....if someone gets a hold of your pistol, they are going to have a very hard time turning it against you, especially if you get a hold on the lanyard and give it a good yank....
simple, proven, low-tech solution.....if I were in management in law enforcement, I would require them.
I'd say this is a fast one they are trying to pull to funnel the money to some black project....hell it could just be for the AF general staff coffee and doughnut fund!
Do some research, trans-uranic oxides are very water soluble....and they are everywhere and have been everywhere for long before us humans came out of the trees.
I don't agree with it's use in weapons, but I have a hard time believing all the doom and gloom stories about it's use. Yes, unquestionably it is a nasty poisonous heavy metal, ranking right up there with lead and mercury, which is where my opposition to it's use in ballistic weapons is grounded.
But read the artice carefully and think really hard on what they are saying.....800 tons (1.6 million lbs ot 727,000 kg which I REALLY doubt) of it used in Afghanistan are equivelent to 250,000 (250 THOUSAND) Nagasaki bombs in radiation dosage.....ummm, now how many people have been directly killed by radiation poisoning? C'mon, it is a very simple and obvious diagnosis....talk to the people that survived Chernobyl.....
I mined uranium in one of the richest deposits in North America (16 million pounds between 1953 and 2000, which makes that 800tons number sound really off...only 10% of our total production over 40+ years), and probably the highest grade deposit in the U.S. and guess what....I am not dying of uranium or radiation poisioning! The ore we were mining was 10%+ (by weight) Uranium oxide, and we were shipping 500-1000 tons ore a day, 5 days a week.....
Exposure to uranium has been tracked for a long time in miners, and never shown to be a problem, unlike Radon gas associated with uranium and thorium found at low levels (15ppm uranium and 45ppm thorium) in most igneous rocks.....Radon is a killer, no doubt about it at all, I have known a lot of old miners that died from lung cancer, mostly from the days when radon level's weren't monitored in the mines, but non-enriched uranium has proven to be very benign.
What I am trying to say is that it is everywhere, our entire ecosystem contains the crap, and while it doesn't make it appropriate to use like the military has been, it isn't near as bad as what some people make it out to be.....I am living, walking, breathing, HEALTHY proof.....
As far as I have heard the blasting caps used in our modern implosion-type warheads are all fiber optic. At least that is the story on why fiber-optic caps are not available to the blasting industry....too precise of timing and too easy to use to make nukes....
It is the same story in mining. I have worked several years underground, and the common-sense gap between the engineers and the real world is pretty amazing. When you have engineering telling you that air quality is good because it isn't setting off the gas meters, yet the air is so thick with smoke you can only see 10' and is about 100 degrees instead of 60 you know those pwople are spending too much time behind desks....
IMO it is because kids come right out of high school, never having to work a real job (flipping burgers is not a 'real' job) and go on to college, being funded by financial aid, and graduate utterly clueless about the real world, as opposed to the old days where the majority of people that got engineering degrees worked theit way through school and were well reounded and experienced by the time they graduated.
That being said I am finishing my engineering degree right now after working in the industry as a miner for the last 7 years....
Jet engines are high torque at high rpm, and very low shaft torque as they spool up, compared to reciprocating engines that make peak shaft torque about halfway through their rpm range (for a normal automobile engine). All the output torque in a turbine driven vehicle comes from a big heavy (in relation to the turbine itself) reduction gear box. They don't have a power curve like a reciprocating engine where you can step on the gas and get good acceleration right from the start.
A good example is the helocopter turbines that they are building motorcycles with (Jay Leno has one). Those bikes start slow, and have pretty constant gentle acceleration, they just keep going faster and Faster and FASTER as engine rpm builds.
Turbines are excellent in constant speed applications, but to have response and driveability in something like a car it takes a pretty complicated transmission. M1 Abrahms tanks use a continously-variable Allison X-1100-3B hydrokinetic transmission, which is a very complicated fluid-drive unit that uses the turbine to drive a variable-displacement hydraulic pump...the turbine runs at pretty constant rpm on low fuel at low demand (just enough to power itself), but as demand increases, the pump moves more fluid and the engine is fed more fuel. That hydraulic fluid then goes to hydraulic motors that are used to actually power the tracks....when the driver steps on the gas, the engine rpm does not vary a whole lot, but the fluid flow increases to the drive motors.
The biggest reason to use a turbine instead of a reciprocating engine in an application like a ship or a tank is that turbines will produce the same (after gearing) power in a smaller physical package.
The one place where turbines may possibly become practical in a car is in hybrids....the wheel motors are driven off of battery voltage, and the turbine turns the alternator to recharge.
I have had very good luck with maxtor drives. I have only had 2 of them ever failout of probably 20 drives, one was a 40mb in a 386 in 1993, and a 30gb last spring, both were covered by warranty (2.5years into a 3 year warranty for the 30gb, was replaced with a 40gb with more cache) and was absolutly hassle free.....that being said, I leave my systems on 24/7, and really believe that the termal cycling of hardware turning it on and off does more damage than anything......
Also, as a side note, I have never had a failure with a Seagate;)
You have never had any self defense training have you? The FIRST and most important thing is self-confidence, he is exactly right about how you carry yourself. If you carry yourself with confidence, are aware of your surroundings, and look like you are capable of putting up a fight, how does the crook know that you aren't carrying a gun yourself? If you don't look like a target, most likely you won't be.
Put a log book at the trailhead, people will sign in or they won't, and if they don't, they don't care about their safety and neither should you.
I am an avid backpacker and spend most of my free time in the wilderness of Montana in the snow-free months. If I knew there was an electronic checkpoint on a trail I would either make a point of hiking around it, or avoiding the area all together.
If you want to do something to really help people that go into the backcountry be safer, then figure out a way to make personal locater beacons (PLBs) afforadable. I backpack alone, way off of the beaten trail, and I take a lot of safety gear (signal mirror, whistle, pencil flares, etc) and I would love to carry a PLB, but at $600 ($700 if you want one that plugs into a GPS unit) there is no way I can affort it, being an engineering student the money just does not exist....
I feel that tracking people without their consent or court order is wrong, no different than someone initiating an illegal wiretap. If we don't put our feet down eventually this is going to turn into a world where children are implanted with tracking units at birth "for their safety" and everything will be under camera surveillance "for our safety."
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I work in the mining industry, and thanks the post 9/11 homeland security laws, you must pass a background check and be a US Citizen or hold a valid green card in order to handle explosives.
Ya, I remember it...I think they might still have the t-shirts on sale...
What, didn't you notice that Vista said "Permanently Remove Hardware" instead of "Safely Remove Hardware"? It's not a bug, it's a feature!
I agree totally, I can't read or do desk work without some sort of "natural" light to soften the flickering from fluorescent lights....if I try to work with just fluorescent lighting it gives me brutal headaches...
My dad is back teaching in a southern Colorado highschool after a 15 year break...the big things he complains about are:
1) No real disipline....students are disruptive and can pretty much do anything (non-violent) that they please because the school district fears lawsuits.
2) Actual teaching becomes secondary because of the babysitting requirements.
3) What actual teaching is done is totally scripted by the administration (the teachers have a very narrow guideline to follow) and basically amounts to programming for the standardized proficiency exams.
4) All the students are treated as if they are university-bound. He feels that this leads to a swiss-army approach that does a marginal job at best.
My personal experience coming out of the same school in 1992 and going directly into an engineering program is that I was not prepared academically or mentally for what I ran into at Colorado School of Mines. Looking back at it now I wish I had worked several years (or done military service) before ever considering engineering, and considering what a job that school was doing then, I would have better off dropping out at 16 and working and getting a GED....the education (or lack thereof) would have been the same and I would have had at least some money and life experience under my belt before tackling engineering....
One big economic reason I know of that is against burying transmission lines underground is heat. The heat created from current flow is not dissipated as easily, creating and more heat and higher resistance due to the heat....This requires larger cables at higher cost, so you have two effects going against you right off....resistance losses, and cable costs. When you add in the labor involved and all of the other odds and ends the economics drive everything towards overhead lines.
I would rather see it go to the military myself, I trust them (in the long run) to protect our civil rights more than the police do.....
I did, weird.....
Read:m osphere.htm
http://www.princeton.edu/~chm333/2004/Hydrogen/at
It explains why Hydrogen released into the atmosphere is a bad thing.....unless we are a lot more careful with H2 than we are with every other fuel we use today, we will be making matters worse, and that isn't counting the fact that the technology still isn't up to speed to make the entire process efficient. A hydrogen economy requires that you produce it, currently from natural gas or water, store/transport it, then feed it to a fuel cell. Right now, the only way to produce Hydrogen without releasing CO2 is to crack water with clean electricity from solar/wind/hydro/nuke power...The fuel cells are delicate, expensive to manufacture, and require expensive materials that have to be mined (OMG he said the M word). Platnium is $800+ an ounce these days....people will be jacking your hydrogen car just to tear apart the fuel cell for the Pt in it......
This whole thing is a waste of our money, the technology is not there, and the advantages don't come close to breaking even with the disadvantages...we need to concentrate on making vehicles more efficient, and start looking seriously at changing power generation world wide over to nuclear or finding a way to sequester the CO2 produced by powerplants.....I think the money being pissed away on hydrogen cars would be a lot better spent on fusion research.....why not spend the cash to recover some helium3 off of the moon for fusion testing....
More than anything I think the goverment supporting Hydrogen research is a way for them to go through the motions, while they line their pockets with more money from Big Oil and Big Coal...and I am talking Everyone in DC, not just the current admin.....
.....it is called a pistol lanyard....swat teams and special ops troops often use them on their sidearms....picture a bicycle cable lock for a pistol, they can be coiled strong elastic cord or coated steel cable connected to the butt of the pistol and the users belt, just long enough that the user can extend the pistol out to arms length.....if someone gets a hold of your pistol, they are going to have a very hard time turning it against you, especially if you get a hold on the lanyard and give it a good yank....
simple, proven, low-tech solution.....if I were in management in law enforcement, I would require them.
laf eim hukd on fonix!
:(
/. grammer/spelling nazis busy!
swear that "create" was all there when I previewed and "to not" said "do not" must be a M$ typo virus
anyway, something to keep the
Hopefully the next thing they figure out about gamers is that violent games to not creat violent people......
I'd say this is a fast one they are trying to pull to funnel the money to some black project....hell it could just be for the AF general staff coffee and doughnut fund!
Do some research, trans-uranic oxides are very water soluble....and they are everywhere and have been everywhere for long before us humans came out of the trees.
I don't agree with it's use in weapons, but I have a hard time believing all the doom and gloom stories about it's use. Yes, unquestionably it is a nasty poisonous heavy metal, ranking right up there with lead and mercury, which is where my opposition to it's use in ballistic weapons is grounded.
But read the artice carefully and think really hard on what they are saying.....800 tons (1.6 million lbs ot 727,000 kg which I REALLY doubt) of it used in Afghanistan are equivelent to 250,000 (250 THOUSAND) Nagasaki bombs in radiation dosage.....ummm, now how many people have been directly killed by radiation poisoning? C'mon, it is a very simple and obvious diagnosis....talk to the people that survived Chernobyl.....
I mined uranium in one of the richest deposits in North America (16 million pounds between 1953 and 2000, which makes that 800tons number sound really off...only 10% of our total production over 40+ years), and probably the highest grade deposit in the U.S. and guess what....I am not dying of uranium or radiation poisioning! The ore we were mining was 10%+ (by weight) Uranium oxide, and we were shipping 500-1000 tons ore a day, 5 days a week.....
Exposure to uranium has been tracked for a long time in miners, and never shown to be a problem, unlike Radon gas associated with uranium and thorium found at low levels (15ppm uranium and 45ppm thorium) in most igneous rocks.....Radon is a killer, no doubt about it at all, I have known a lot of old miners that died from lung cancer, mostly from the days when radon level's weren't monitored in the mines, but non-enriched uranium has proven to be very benign.
What I am trying to say is that it is everywhere, our entire ecosystem contains the crap, and while it doesn't make it appropriate to use like the military has been, it isn't near as bad as what some people make it out to be.....I am living, walking, breathing, HEALTHY proof.....
it was my 10th birthday, I will remember it forever because it was the day that I personally figured out that the world is not a happy place....
As far as I have heard the blasting caps used in our modern implosion-type warheads are all fiber optic. At least that is the story on why fiber-optic caps are not available to the blasting industry....too precise of timing and too easy to use to make nukes....
It is the same story in mining. I have worked several years underground, and the common-sense gap between the engineers and the real world is pretty amazing. When you have engineering telling you that air quality is good because it isn't setting off the gas meters, yet the air is so thick with smoke you can only see 10' and is about 100 degrees instead of 60 you know those pwople are spending too much time behind desks....
IMO it is because kids come right out of high school, never having to work a real job (flipping burgers is not a 'real' job) and go on to college, being funded by financial aid, and graduate utterly clueless about the real world, as opposed to the old days where the majority of people that got engineering degrees worked theit way through school and were well reounded and experienced by the time they graduated.
That being said I am finishing my engineering degree right now after working in the industry as a miner for the last 7 years....
Jet engines are high torque at high rpm, and very low shaft torque as they spool up, compared to reciprocating engines that make peak shaft torque about halfway through their rpm range (for a normal automobile engine). All the output torque in a turbine driven vehicle comes from a big heavy (in relation to the turbine itself) reduction gear box. They don't have a power curve like a reciprocating engine where you can step on the gas and get good acceleration right from the start.
A good example is the helocopter turbines that they are building motorcycles with (Jay Leno has one). Those bikes start slow, and have pretty constant gentle acceleration, they just keep going faster and Faster and FASTER as engine rpm builds.
Turbines are excellent in constant speed applications, but to have response and driveability in something like a car it takes a pretty complicated transmission. M1 Abrahms tanks use a continously-variable Allison X-1100-3B hydrokinetic transmission, which is a very complicated fluid-drive unit that uses the turbine to drive a variable-displacement hydraulic pump...the turbine runs at pretty constant rpm on low fuel at low demand (just enough to power itself), but as demand increases, the pump moves more fluid and the engine is fed more fuel. That hydraulic fluid then goes to hydraulic motors that are used to actually power the tracks....when the driver steps on the gas, the engine rpm does not vary a whole lot, but the fluid flow increases to the drive motors.
The biggest reason to use a turbine instead of a reciprocating engine in an application like a ship or a tank is that turbines will produce the same (after gearing) power in a smaller physical package.
The one place where turbines may possibly become practical in a car is in hybrids....the wheel motors are driven off of battery voltage, and the turbine turns the alternator to recharge.
I have had very good luck with maxtor drives. I have only had 2 of them ever failout of probably 20 drives, one was a 40mb in a 386 in 1993, and a 30gb last spring, both were covered by warranty (2.5years into a 3 year warranty for the 30gb, was replaced with a 40gb with more cache) and was absolutly hassle free.....that being said, I leave my systems on 24/7, and really believe that the termal cycling of hardware turning it on and off does more damage than anything......
;)
Also, as a side note, I have never had a failure with a Seagate
That might be just enough bandwidth to get a life-like signal to the holographic projector!
What kind of gas mileage will they get when they are loaded up with 1000+ pounds of DOT required safety equipment?
21 highway, 17 city, exactly the epa ratings....
Where does it stop? scanners and copiers and printers can all be used to reproduce copyrighted materials....
You have never had any self defense training have you? The FIRST and most important thing is self-confidence, he is exactly right about how you carry yourself. If you carry yourself with confidence, are aware of your surroundings, and look like you are capable of putting up a fight, how does the crook know that you aren't carrying a gun yourself? If you don't look like a target, most likely you won't be.
Put a log book at the trailhead, people will sign in or they won't, and if they don't, they don't care about their safety and neither should you.
I am an avid backpacker and spend most of my free time in the wilderness of Montana in the snow-free months. If I knew there was an electronic checkpoint on a trail I would either make a point of hiking around it, or avoiding the area all together.
If you want to do something to really help people that go into the backcountry be safer, then figure out a way to make personal locater beacons (PLBs) afforadable. I backpack alone, way off of the beaten trail, and I take a lot of safety gear (signal mirror, whistle, pencil flares, etc) and I would love to carry a PLB, but at $600 ($700 if you want one that plugs into a GPS unit) there is no way I can affort it, being an engineering student the money just does not exist....
I feel that tracking people without their consent or court order is wrong, no different than someone initiating an illegal wiretap. If we don't put our feet down eventually this is going to turn into a world where children are implanted with tracking units at birth "for their safety" and everything will be under camera surveillance "for our safety."