"Ice is generally a difficult thing to find in a combat zone, even one as metropolitan as Iraq."
The unit I was formerly with (3rd ACR, Army) has gigantic semi-trailer sized ice making machines. I don't know the exact output for one of these, but it must be in the tons per day.
Well sure, back in the "comforts" of Camp Grit there's PLENTY of ice; but I can say from personal experience* that a cooler full of ice won't last but a couple hours in a hot hum-v.
Are adaptations of books, old movies and sequels all that Hollywood can produce now? Sad state for a supposedly "creative" industry.
Key word above is "supposedly". It's actually not a very creative industry*. The vast majority of TV and film writers are (to put it bluntly) talentless, literarily ignorant hacks. Good writers, no matter what they write, are invariably voracious readers, and in my experience people who go into TV and film writing often tend to be fans of TV and film rather than readers of books. I have, on more than one occasion, made reference to Apocalypse Now and its roots in Heart of Darkness while working with TV and film writers, and not only have they not only not read Heart of Darkness, but they haven't even heard of it! This being the case, it's hardly surprising that "hollywood" tends towards material based on books written by good writers-- but even then, the finished product tends to show the telltale marks of hack-butchery by the marginally literate script writers.
Sequels are just the most obvious way to exploit a previously successful idea.
* there are of course pockets of creativity in certain areas, such as cinematography, or effects design.
I would assume that this system costs a hojillion-billion dollars, because it was "developed" for the military.
Civilian racing versions usually feature a small pump inside of a water reservoir in an ice cooler. The pump runs off the car's 12VDC system. The rest of the cooler is filled with ice, to keep the water cold.
You can get one right here for $320 (for a limited time.) Perhaps the military should just buy them from those guys, if they can come up with 40,000 of them or so:)
I'm fairly certain the military version will be more sophisticated and not require a cooler full of ice. Ice is generally a difficult thing to find in a combat zone, even one as metropolitan as Iraq.
I have a solution though, and have mentioned it before. Licensing. Want to own a computer? Fine, buy one. When you want to go online, you'll need a license. Like to send and receive email? That requires an endorsement. Same goes for running a server of any type. Messages cannot be sent without license identification and abusing users can cause their operators license to be revoked. No valid license, no connectivity.
Sounds just peachy, but who's going to be in charge of enforcement? What will the penalties for non-compliance be? What happens when the system gets misused, e.g. MegaCorp weasels a clause in that effectively jacks up the licensing fees for their competitors' employees? How do we get this Stasi-like compulsory licensing authority to have any weight in othe countries? It's a nice dream, but totally impractical.
why must all 12 posters in my example above think that they were the first (and only) person to realize it was a duplicate story?
They don't think that. It's just that since it is a dupe, the actual content has already been extensively commented on elsewhere, leaving nothing but its status as a dupe to talk about. If you want to read about MS discontinuing IE for the Mac, go back to the original article on the subject. The de facto topic under discussion in duped articles always reverts to "dupes and the lazy, unprofessional/. editors who post them".
But "radiation" can't be stored in a container. Radioactive material, however, can be. Add to that the fact that the submitter was anonymous, and this story should not have been picked up. Hmm. I wonder whats on digg right now.
Damn straight. It's ignoramuses like the anonymous submitter who keep irradiated food off the market when there's no rational reason for it. I could be dining off vacu-packed and irradiated steaks all week on a backcountry hiking trip, but because a bunch of dumbshits don't know the difference between "radiation" and "radioactive" I'm stuck with MREs and freeze dried crap.
From what I've heard (I'm too young to remember it directly), things weren't too bad under the Ma Bell monopoly the first time around
I actually remember it. There was a certain degree of predictability that we don't have anymore. They owned the whole system, from the lond distance system to the CO to the jack in your living room, so any trouble was definitely their problem and indeed they fixed things quickly. But there was a dark side. To make a bastardized reference to the Ben Franklin quote, the AT&T monopoly essentially guaranteed safety at the price of freedom. Local residential service was very cheap because it was subsidized by long distance. The old days were a time when you didn't talk to out of state relatives but a couple times a year, and then for not very long. And forget calling overseas. The only people who could afford to regularly use long distance were businesses, and they only did when they had to. Starting in the 50's and exploding in the 60's and 70's, the old AT&T service pricing more and more reflected a country that no longer existed. We were no longer a country of insular agrarian communities with no need or desire for outside communication. People no longer lived worked and died in the same place they were born. They moved around, sometimes going great distances. Also, TV came along and brought the outside world closer. By the late 70's, AT&T was a company with the most advanced 20th century equipment, but with a largely 19th century business model. MCI suing for access was just the inevitable first step in the explosion of the "information age". Widespread, global communication had reached a point where it was not only possible, but it was easy (at least from a technical standpoint). The problem was that the next step, communication becoming inexpensive, was thoroughly and completely blocked by a behemoth monopoly that had no reason to change its way of doing business. You think Ma Bell would have rolled out DSL for cheap? I remember even back in 1995 Pacific Bell was reluctant to field DSL because it
was afraid to lose all that revenue from locked-in T1 and ISDN customers. Large incumbent monopolies are famous for not exploiting emerging markets until competitors force them into it. No, the AT&T monopoly was tolerable for the first 80 years or so, but by 1984 it's time had definitely passed.
Oh, and what does a "head shop" that specializes in "smoke accessories" and has a massive painting of marijuana on the wall sell?
Uh, they sell smoking accessories. A head shop that even hints that they sell illegal drug parephenalia gets closed down by pretty quick. Go ahead, walk into a head shop and ask "do you have any marijuana pipes?" and see if they don't respond with "no, no drub stuff here, get the fuck OUT, asshole!" You see, drugs and drug parephenalia are still illegal, even here in california. They're just tolerated to a greater degree.
Can you imagine someone spending a few grand on AV and then being too cheap to buy a DVD?
I think you should have worded this differently, as a few people are anecdotally known to do this (as the comments show). A more appropriate statement would be:
"Can you imagine a statistically significant number of people spending a few grand on AV and then being too cheap to buy a DVD?"
Because yes, there is always that weirdo (my brother is one) with the terrabyte disk array who gets all his video from P2P, IRC, or NetFlix rips. That type of weirdo, however, isn't common enough to be a threat to the industry's revenue stream.
However, their study does not resolve or even address one problem with this conclusion - the lights have been visible long before cars were common, or even available, in the area.
Just because they move like headlights now doesn't mean they always have. Early sightings have the lights looking like campfires which, upon investigation, could not be found. Therefore it seems likely that these sightings actually were campfires that were in reality a long way off on the other side of the mountains.
As others have noted, the lights have been around for a long time. This study seems to neglect that, since cars would not have been nearly common enough in the 1880s to be a likely cause, and while it could be a reflectorized light on a wagon or carriage, it just seems unlikely.
Think, man. The source of the light doesn't have to be a vehicle light. Just because it's a car today doesn't mean it had to be a car in 1880, or even that it had to be a freakin' wagon. It could have just as easily been a campfire. Atmospherically refracted light can appear to move around even when the light source is stationary.
The reason I call it a PR stunt is because asking for open-ended "grand visions" doesn't seem likely to turn up anything new that hasn't been considered before - at least by any number of science fiction writers.
They're not looking for pie-in-the-sky fantasies, they're requesting grant proposals, complete with timetables, budgets, and similar projections. They will necessarily get mostly serious proposals. The difference between these and previous grants is that NASA isn't soliciting grants for specific things this time. They're not looking for totally new stuff that "hasn't been considered before", but rather for stuff that hasn't been considered by NASA before.
Which means I think the money would be better spent reviewing what HAS been considered by other people and then picking whatever seems most likely to be productive of real breakthroughs in technological capability.
Hellooooo! That's precisely what they're doing.
Nanotech obviously fits that category.
Ya, OK, but I think "magnetism" or maybe "atomics" might yield better results. Seriously, they're not asking for grant proposals on discovering totally new to this planet sciences, like plans for charging manastones on mars, or studying the uses of kryptonite in space rockets. They're just asking for ideas based on regular science that may not have occurred to them.
I doubt ANYBODY has ANY decent comprehensive concept of "how to expand humans throughout the solar system". That's pure "pie in the sky" unlikely to lead to any specific productive research projects.
On what do you base these doubts? Sure, the goal may sound a bit grandiose, but you gotta start somewhere. Nobody is seriously going to submit a grandiose plan to accomplish that goal in one fell swoop of research.
I could easily submit a proposal to pursue the development of a decent simulation of human conceptual processing. The benefits of that, even if it failed to produce a true AI, would obviously be enormous in the area of software design and command and control software - which is obviously valuable to NASA.
I question whether that would be worth my time since I would expect the decision makers to be flooded with less useful "visions" a la the above, and the more useful projects to be lost in the noise.
Noise gets weeded out pretty quick. So long as you can present your idea such that you don't sound like a crackpot, you'll stand out beyond the ones that can't. Right there you've probably made it to the top 5%.
Despite what your Maxist professor or the evening news taught you, McCarthy was spot on in almost every one of his accusations...
Huh? You mean Paul Robeson was plotting the overthrow of the US government?
Hey genius, Senator McCarthy had nothing to do with the House Unamerican Activities Committee (before which Robeson famously testified). Brain surgeons such as yourself frequently talk about the the stupid shit HUAC did and label it McCarthyism, when in fact Senator McCarthy's targets were by and large credible threats.
If we were 3D beings we would not be able to *move* or do anything in 3D space. We need a fourth dimension over which the variabels can change. This is time.
Yes yes yes, but we're talking about physical dimensions here. This particular universe has only 3 physical dimensions. Calling time a fourth dimension is useful for purposes of argument, but isn't really relevant here.
Standard use on hardwood floors. And I do not have children or dogs for that matter. What model do you own? I purchased the Discovery SE and I am certainly not the only one experiencing this - a quick search on roombareview can confirm this.
Hmmmm....I have an "original Roomba" from when there was only one model, and I recently picked up a Discovery SE. Searching the Roombareview.com forum I find a few people complaining of bad sucker motors and erratic behavior with the Discovery, but the biggest complaint seems to be slow turnaround on warranty returns from iRobot. I haven't noticed any problems yet with my new roomba, but I've only had it a couple months...
I really want to like the Roomba. It is a cool, affordable and self destructs about once a month. After going through five Roombas, I finally gave up and bought a Trilobite instead. The Roomba is potentially nice, but the crap quality means that it is little more than a nifty toy.
Cripes, what did you DO to them? I've had the same roomba for like three years and it has survived falls down stairs, getting piched under a rocking chair, and numerous random abuses from dogs and children. They're not built like tanks, but I wouldn't say they're "crap quality". They're just "minimally durable". Crap quality implies that they can't take normal, responsible use.
What does a half dimension look like?
Yeah, I understand what it means in this context, and I don't fault the parent poster for using it. . . but, at some level it just doesn't make sense. Not sure what a better description would be, though. Perhaps "tiered 2D" or something of the sort?
2D with depth cueing. We actually see in 2D, and our brains use analysis of the differential between the two offset images to estimate depth variations. It's more than flat 2D vision, but it's certainly not full 3D (which would allow us to see inside solid things). Hence the splitting of the difference and calling it 2.5D
seriously, you're reading way too much into that, and no, seeing as our sight comes from three dimensions to two points in 3D space, we do have 3D vision.
No, you are failing to understand the concept. We don't have 3D vision. We have 2D vision with depth cueing (AKA 2.5D). Each eye sees a 2D picture. You cannot see the back of someone's head from the front, you can't see south if you're facing north, and the inside of a soccer ball isn't visible unless you cut it open. You are seeing in 2 dimensions. Having a pair of eyes just gives the brain two slightly different 2D pictures from which it matematically estimates distances. Like the GP poster said, seeing in true 3D would require a 3D perceptive array as part of a 4D visual organ (just as our retina is a 2D array, part of our 3D eye). Being that we are 3D beings, we can't have a visual organ capable of supporting a 3D sensor array. 2D vision is all we have!
FWIW, Nietzsche's point is somewhat missed in translation. He's paraphrasing an old saying "that which doesn't kill, hardens". It just generally means that surviving adversity leaves you better equipped to survive further adversity. Nothing to do with physical "strength".
I mean, doesn't typing just increase flexibility and muscle strength in the wrist?
Typing consists of small, weak muscle movements through a very tiny range of motion. Flexibility comes from pushing the boundaries of range of motion, and strength comes from pushing the boundaries of a muscle's capabilities. Typing is only slightly better than sitting around with all the muscles in your hands tensed, fingers splayed out straight and stiff.
You (and implictly the submitter) are assuming longer == more content. Typically, better writers can say more with less words.
You are assuming that in this case "fewer words" necessarily means "more concise" rather than possibly "less information". Unless someone here examines the articles in question, this argument is pointless.
Teachers as a group, however, are terribly slow to adapt to change, and few of them seem to have noticed that the current Earl of Higglesbottom is drunk who had to sell his ancestral castle and now lives above the grocer's in a bedsit, so there's really no point to cursive any more.
When you get right down to it, the original purpose cursive was to facilitate writing with a quill. Every lift and drop of the quill pen would leave a blob of ink. Contrary to what our grade school teachers led us to believe, cursive isn't "proper" writing, it's actually a hack to allow continuous writing with a quill. While it is slightly faster to write in cursive, the small gain in speed comes at a major sacrifice of legibility. I concur, there's really no rational reason to be teaching children to write like the Earl of Higglesbottom. We don't teach them how to dance a waltz, or to fence, or which fork to use at a fancy dinner. Why the fixation on cursive?
This cursive crap is something that annoys me daily. My bosses write out work orders in their absolutely illegible handwriting and then get annoyed when I ask them if I'm supposed to hire a fucking detective to figure out where and what work needs to be done (go figure). I reverted to daftsman-style block printing long ago. My writing doesn't look any worse than their chicken scratches, and it's completely legible. I look forward to the day when the ubiquity of the keyboard finally drives a stake through the heart of cursive writing.
from http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos037.htm
"Petroleum engineers search the world for reservoirs containing oil or natural gas. Once these resources are discovered, petroleum engineers work with geologists and other specialists to understand the geologic formation and properties of the rock containing the reservoir, determine the drilling methods to be used, and monitor drilling and production operations. They design equipment and processes to achieve the maximum profitable recovery of oil and gas. Petroleum engineers rely heavily on computer models to simulate reservoir performance using different recovery techniques. They also use computer models for simulations of the effects of various drilling options.
Because only a small proportion of oil and gas in a reservoir will flow out under natural forces, petroleum engineers develop and use various enhanced recovery methods. These include injecting water, chemicals, gases, or steam into an oil reservoir to force out more of the oil, and computer-controlled drilling or fracturing to connect a larger area of a reservoir to a single well. Because even the best techniques in use today recover only a portion of the oil and gas in a reservoir, petroleum engineers research and develop technology and methods to increase recovery and lower the cost of drilling and production operations."
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The unit I was formerly with (3rd ACR, Army) has gigantic semi-trailer sized ice making machines. I don't know the exact output for one of these, but it must be in the tons per day.
Well sure, back in the "comforts" of Camp Grit there's PLENTY of ice; but I can say from personal experience* that a cooler full of ice won't last but a couple hours in a hot hum-v.
*(311thMI BN, 101stAB '87-'91)
Key word above is "supposedly". It's actually not a very creative industry*. The vast majority of TV and film writers are (to put it bluntly) talentless, literarily ignorant hacks. Good writers, no matter what they write, are invariably voracious readers, and in my experience people who go into TV and film writing often tend to be fans of TV and film rather than readers of books. I have, on more than one occasion, made reference to Apocalypse Now and its roots in Heart of Darkness while working with TV and film writers, and not only have they not only not read Heart of Darkness, but they haven't even heard of it! This being the case, it's hardly surprising that "hollywood" tends towards material based on books written by good writers-- but even then, the finished product tends to show the telltale marks of hack-butchery by the marginally literate script writers.
Sequels are just the most obvious way to exploit a previously successful idea.
* there are of course pockets of creativity in certain areas, such as cinematography, or effects design.
I'm fairly certain the military version will be more sophisticated and not require a cooler full of ice. Ice is generally a difficult thing to find in a combat zone, even one as metropolitan as Iraq.
Sounds just peachy, but who's going to be in charge of enforcement? What will the penalties for non-compliance be? What happens when the system gets misused, e.g. MegaCorp weasels a clause in that effectively jacks up the licensing fees for their competitors' employees? How do we get this Stasi-like compulsory licensing authority to have any weight in othe countries? It's a nice dream, but totally impractical.
They don't think that. It's just that since it is a dupe, the actual content has already been extensively commented on elsewhere, leaving nothing but its status as a dupe to talk about. If you want to read about MS discontinuing IE for the Mac, go back to the original article on the subject. The de facto topic under discussion in duped articles always reverts to "dupes and the lazy, unprofessional /. editors who post them".
There are other options. Like meaty travel companions and a big knife.
Ah yes, the "long pork". Al Packer may have been on to something...
Damn straight. It's ignoramuses like the anonymous submitter who keep irradiated food off the market when there's no rational reason for it. I could be dining off vacu-packed and irradiated steaks all week on a backcountry hiking trip, but because a bunch of dumbshits don't know the difference between "radiation" and "radioactive" I'm stuck with MREs and freeze dried crap.
I actually remember it. There was a certain degree of predictability that we don't have anymore. They owned the whole system, from the lond distance system to the CO to the jack in your living room, so any trouble was definitely their problem and indeed they fixed things quickly. But there was a dark side. To make a bastardized reference to the Ben Franklin quote, the AT&T monopoly essentially guaranteed safety at the price of freedom. Local residential service was very cheap because it was subsidized by long distance. The old days were a time when you didn't talk to out of state relatives but a couple times a year, and then for not very long. And forget calling overseas. The only people who could afford to regularly use long distance were businesses, and they only did when they had to. Starting in the 50's and exploding in the 60's and 70's, the old AT&T service pricing more and more reflected a country that no longer existed. We were no longer a country of insular agrarian communities with no need or desire for outside communication. People no longer lived worked and died in the same place they were born. They moved around, sometimes going great distances. Also, TV came along and brought the outside world closer. By the late 70's, AT&T was a company with the most advanced 20th century equipment, but with a largely 19th century business model. MCI suing for access was just the inevitable first step in the explosion of the "information age". Widespread, global communication had reached a point where it was not only possible, but it was easy (at least from a technical standpoint). The problem was that the next step, communication becoming inexpensive, was thoroughly and completely blocked by a behemoth monopoly that had no reason to change its way of doing business. You think Ma Bell would have rolled out DSL for cheap? I remember even back in 1995 Pacific Bell was reluctant to field DSL because it was afraid to lose all that revenue from locked-in T1 and ISDN customers. Large incumbent monopolies are famous for not exploiting emerging markets until competitors force them into it. No, the AT&T monopoly was tolerable for the first 80 years or so, but by 1984 it's time had definitely passed.
Uh, they sell smoking accessories. A head shop that even hints that they sell illegal drug parephenalia gets closed down by pretty quick. Go ahead, walk into a head shop and ask "do you have any marijuana pipes?" and see if they don't respond with "no, no drub stuff here, get the fuck OUT, asshole!" You see, drugs and drug parephenalia are still illegal, even here in california. They're just tolerated to a greater degree.
I think you should have worded this differently, as a few people are anecdotally known to do this (as the comments show). A more appropriate statement would be:
"Can you imagine a statistically significant number of people spending a few grand on AV and then being too cheap to buy a DVD?"
Because yes, there is always that weirdo (my brother is one) with the terrabyte disk array who gets all his video from P2P, IRC, or NetFlix rips. That type of weirdo, however, isn't common enough to be a threat to the industry's revenue stream.
Just because they move like headlights now doesn't mean they always have. Early sightings have the lights looking like campfires which, upon investigation, could not be found. Therefore it seems likely that these sightings actually were campfires that were in reality a long way off on the other side of the mountains.
But they haven't been around longer than illumination in general. Nobody said it had to be car headlights in 1880.
Think, man. The source of the light doesn't have to be a vehicle light. Just because it's a car today doesn't mean it had to be a car in 1880, or even that it had to be a freakin' wagon. It could have just as easily been a campfire. Atmospherically refracted light can appear to move around even when the light source is stationary.
They're not looking for pie-in-the-sky fantasies, they're requesting grant proposals, complete with timetables, budgets, and similar projections. They will necessarily get mostly serious proposals. The difference between these and previous grants is that NASA isn't soliciting grants for specific things this time. They're not looking for totally new stuff that "hasn't been considered before", but rather for stuff that hasn't been considered by NASA before.
Which means I think the money would be better spent reviewing what HAS been considered by other people and then picking whatever seems most likely to be productive of real breakthroughs in technological capability.
Hellooooo! That's precisely what they're doing.
Nanotech obviously fits that category.
Ya, OK, but I think "magnetism" or maybe "atomics" might yield better results. Seriously, they're not asking for grant proposals on discovering totally new to this planet sciences, like plans for charging manastones on mars, or studying the uses of kryptonite in space rockets. They're just asking for ideas based on regular science that may not have occurred to them.
I doubt ANYBODY has ANY decent comprehensive concept of "how to expand humans throughout the solar system". That's pure "pie in the sky" unlikely to lead to any specific productive research projects.
On what do you base these doubts? Sure, the goal may sound a bit grandiose, but you gotta start somewhere. Nobody is seriously going to submit a grandiose plan to accomplish that goal in one fell swoop of research.
I could easily submit a proposal to pursue the development of a decent simulation of human conceptual processing. The benefits of that, even if it failed to produce a true AI, would obviously be enormous in the area of software design and command and control software - which is obviously valuable to NASA. I question whether that would be worth my time since I would expect the decision makers to be flooded with less useful "visions" a la the above, and the more useful projects to be lost in the noise.
Noise gets weeded out pretty quick. So long as you can present your idea such that you don't sound like a crackpot, you'll stand out beyond the ones that can't. Right there you've probably made it to the top 5%.
Huh? You mean Paul Robeson was plotting the overthrow of the US government?
Hey genius, Senator McCarthy had nothing to do with the House Unamerican Activities Committee (before which Robeson famously testified). Brain surgeons such as yourself frequently talk about the the stupid shit HUAC did and label it McCarthyism, when in fact Senator McCarthy's targets were by and large credible threats.
If we were 3D beings we would not be able to *move* or do anything in 3D space. We need a fourth dimension over which the variabels can change. This is time.
Yes yes yes, but we're talking about physical dimensions here. This particular universe has only 3 physical dimensions. Calling time a fourth dimension is useful for purposes of argument, but isn't really relevant here.
Hmmmm....I have an "original Roomba" from when there was only one model, and I recently picked up a Discovery SE. Searching the Roombareview.com forum I find a few people complaining of bad sucker motors and erratic behavior with the Discovery, but the biggest complaint seems to be slow turnaround on warranty returns from iRobot. I haven't noticed any problems yet with my new roomba, but I've only had it a couple months...
Cripes, what did you DO to them? I've had the same roomba for like three years and it has survived falls down stairs, getting piched under a rocking chair, and numerous random abuses from dogs and children. They're not built like tanks, but I wouldn't say they're "crap quality". They're just "minimally durable". Crap quality implies that they can't take normal, responsible use.
2D with depth cueing. We actually see in 2D, and our brains use analysis of the differential between the two offset images to estimate depth variations. It's more than flat 2D vision, but it's certainly not full 3D (which would allow us to see inside solid things). Hence the splitting of the difference and calling it 2.5D
No, you are failing to understand the concept. We don't have 3D vision. We have 2D vision with depth cueing (AKA 2.5D). Each eye sees a 2D picture. You cannot see the back of someone's head from the front, you can't see south if you're facing north, and the inside of a soccer ball isn't visible unless you cut it open. You are seeing in 2 dimensions. Having a pair of eyes just gives the brain two slightly different 2D pictures from which it matematically estimates distances. Like the GP poster said, seeing in true 3D would require a 3D perceptive array as part of a 4D visual organ (just as our retina is a 2D array, part of our 3D eye). Being that we are 3D beings, we can't have a visual organ capable of supporting a 3D sensor array. 2D vision is all we have!
FWIW, Nietzsche's point is somewhat missed in translation. He's paraphrasing an old saying "that which doesn't kill, hardens". It just generally means that surviving adversity leaves you better equipped to survive further adversity. Nothing to do with physical "strength".
I mean, doesn't typing just increase flexibility and muscle strength in the wrist?
Typing consists of small, weak muscle movements through a very tiny range of motion. Flexibility comes from pushing the boundaries of range of motion, and strength comes from pushing the boundaries of a muscle's capabilities. Typing is only slightly better than sitting around with all the muscles in your hands tensed, fingers splayed out straight and stiff.
You are assuming that in this case "fewer words" necessarily means "more concise" rather than possibly "less information". Unless someone here examines the articles in question, this argument is pointless.
Really? Here in firefox I seem to have kerning. fi fo fa -- in TNR those f's seem to overlap the vowels. Is there more to kerning than that?
When you get right down to it, the original purpose cursive was to facilitate writing with a quill. Every lift and drop of the quill pen would leave a blob of ink. Contrary to what our grade school teachers led us to believe, cursive isn't "proper" writing, it's actually a hack to allow continuous writing with a quill. While it is slightly faster to write in cursive, the small gain in speed comes at a major sacrifice of legibility. I concur, there's really no rational reason to be teaching children to write like the Earl of Higglesbottom. We don't teach them how to dance a waltz, or to fence, or which fork to use at a fancy dinner. Why the fixation on cursive?
This cursive crap is something that annoys me daily. My bosses write out work orders in their absolutely illegible handwriting and then get annoyed when I ask them if I'm supposed to hire a fucking detective to figure out where and what work needs to be done (go figure). I reverted to daftsman-style block printing long ago. My writing doesn't look any worse than their chicken scratches, and it's completely legible. I look forward to the day when the ubiquity of the keyboard finally drives a stake through the heart of cursive writing.
Because only a small proportion of oil and gas in a reservoir will flow out under natural forces, petroleum engineers develop and use various enhanced recovery methods. These include injecting water, chemicals, gases, or steam into an oil reservoir to force out more of the oil, and computer-controlled drilling or fracturing to connect a larger area of a reservoir to a single well. Because even the best techniques in use today recover only a portion of the oil and gas in a reservoir, petroleum engineers research and develop technology and methods to increase recovery and lower the cost of drilling and production operations."
see also http://www.spe.org/