But make sure the applications you use have good standards for import/export, or are open source with comprehensible code in a language for which you have some hope of proficiency.
Otherwise, when the application programmer goes away, or the company goes out of business, you can be stranded with your data in a lot of obscure (probably binary) formats that are now useless. Of course, you only discover this kind of thing after an OS upgrade or something that breaks the old application...
Valve is selling an unrestricted copy of the game with no limits applied to it.
Are you sure?
I'm not saying you necessarily need a license to use copyrighted material. I'm saying that a company can sell a software license as opposed to software ownership.
While I'm not a lawyer, I believe that a company can sell a license that restricts your rights with regard to the product. Now, if it's not in the fine print on the outside of the box or the media envelope, you may well be right. I don't know if anyone has ever contested the "shrinkwrap" licenses on the envelope containing the actual media just because the license was not also on the outside of the box.
I don't want an annual pass to HL2. I want to own HL2.
Yes, and I want a lot of things myself... unlimited political power... throngs and bevies of hot lust-filled babes following me around... 10 teraflop notebook computer that weighs 6 ounces... etc.
It doesn't look like Valve is selling ownership. They're selling a usage license, evidently. It's unfortunate, but that's the way it is.
Yes, but even thought the language has a nasty syntax, it's certainly no harder to learn than, say, the complexities of regular expressions.
As for the errors, I guess it depends on how you parse "customer's recommendations." I was uncharitable in my parsing, since the patent involved was about purchase-based recommendations, not customer-created recommendations.
And hell, I'm a churlish curmudgeon, and felt like being a nitpicker. Sue me. Or mod me down.
I just came across it yesterday, and haven't had a chance to do a rigorous test to prove that it's not something stupid I'm doing in my code.
I was actually hoping that Wisdom of Slashdot would descend upon me, and someone would say "you *did* remember to [whatever I'm forgetting], didn't you?" so I could just say "doh!" and get my code to work. I'll be digging deeper in the next couple of days, and will be able to report back then.
Is it just me, or does Open Office write something into its Excel-formatted files that breaks the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel package on CPAN?
I find that some cells return the content type rather than the content when retrieving $cell->Value (e.g., "GENERAL" rather than "foo", which is the cell contents).
If I use a spreadsheet saved from Excel it works; if I read it into OO, and save it out, I experience the problem.
It wasn't really my intent to blame the standard. I just have the experience of having to implement pages that work on those legacy browsers. So I have to adopt a hybrid approach.
Unfortunately, those "couple of rogue companies" you mention happen to completely dominate the browser market. With any luck, Moz/Firefox/Konq et al will change that. But for now, like it or not, I have to be able to work with IE.
You've obviously never had to maintain somebody else's tables-based code...
Point taken. People can make some pretty ugly tables. I've seen 'em and loathed 'em. And, getting back to the grandparent's point, some programs can generate some vile HTML.
What's so hard about...
Consider a case where you have three-column interface, different background shades for each column, all with a header and footer div. Oh, and it all wants to be centered in the browser window. Sure, it should be as easy as the example you provide, but IE has serious problems with floats within, say, the center column (i.e., subcolumns). It's not a problem with the standard. It's a problem with the implementations of the standard. But I'm stuck supporting that implementation.
Wow. So I've gone from giving my opinions on the relative strengths and weaknesses of CSS and tables, to being unethical, irresponsible, and promising the impossible. Gotta love Slashdot.
In any case, I think you're reading a lot into my comments that is not what I intended to express. Fine, I'm not the most articulate writer in the world. Whatever. Fundamentally, we're actually pretty close to agreement, and if you weren't so anxious to paint me as some kind of an ignorant and deceptive idiot, I'd be interested in continuing this conversation to clarify those points. But, as it happens, you is and so I ain't.
I'll admit that there are certain really odd things that crop up with CSS too, especially in Internet Explorer, but really, it isn't much worse...
I guess it all comes down to requirements. When you have clients who demand things work in IE 5.0, you really worry about bad CSS implementations. Most table issues have been worked out by browsers with versions > 4, or only happen with deep nesting.
Generally, I work with layouts that a single table would handle, or, perhaps, one level of nesting. In most cases, it's trivial to do in CSS. In some cases, it's quite difficult (see below).
What's so hard about setting a width and floating it off to the side? For the vast majority of layouts, CSS is straightforward.
Once again, what's straightforward is relative. For example, making a three-column layout with a header div and a footer div, and which centers in the user's browser window, requires a lot of silly things like negative padding. Sure, you can say "but don't do that!" Unfortunately, my job is usually to implement someone else's design, and that someone else works with the person who pays the bills.
CSS does not give you this. HTML certainly doesn't give you this either, the whole idea of "control" is antithetical to the web.
Of course. The whole idea behind HTML was easy, device independent markup. Now welcome to the real world of clients. You can build them what they want, or you can watch them go to some other developer with their money.
The fact is, CSS gives you pixel-level control within some fairly rigid constraints. If you're working with IE 6 and Mozilla, you can provide a precise layout (assuming, as you point out, that the user does not override it).
you know the 'C' in 'CSS' stands for "cascading"
Golly. And here I was, stupidly thinking it stood for "Condescending."
If you want control, the web isn't the right medium for you.
Nice sentiment, and, on a technical level I agree. If I could, I'd be spending all my time doing the interesting work in the back-end using well-designed frameworks, designing a efficient database schemas, and then just throwing simple tabular interfaces on 'em. But once again, welcome to my real world. Clients hire me to put their applications online. They have strong ideas about how things should look, and it's not my place to tell them that they can't do what they want. I can give suggestions, I can make recommendations, but in the end, the design is their decision. If it's a truly technical issue (i.e., "but people will mis-use that application to send spam!), I can insist. When it comes to layout, I can't.
CSS gives me pixel-level control for an agreed-upon requirement set. That really sums it up for me. CSS is a tool that saves me time and makes for faster loading pages. It doesn't solve all problems for all situations. And frankly, I can be nondogmatic. I use a mix of both CSS and tables -- whatever works best and requires the least effort.
CSS *sucks* for cross-browser compatibility. It takes a lot of work, and still will not support legacy browsers.
Easy, since all the programs do it, and we've all been doing it since 1995. How tricky could <TR><TD> etc get?
Multi-column layouts without intense pain. CSS can do this, but you have to play silly games.
Reasons to use CSS:
Separates the design into a cachable file. Faster load times.
Your HTML pages will be tiny. And probably usable on wierd devices. Again, faster load times.
Skinnable sites, based on arbitrary criteria (server side or client side).
Control. If you want pixel-level control, you can have it. At a price. And if you don't care about legacy browsers.
Easier to change layouts generated by code. Change the stylesheet, not the code. I found this important when working on a site that statically built large numbers of pages and took a long time to create.
Elitist Wankerdom. You know you want to be an Elitist Wanker like the rest of us. If you can't sling acronyms like CSS and XSLT (oooh!), you just have to face up to the fact that you suck.
There you go folks. A handy guide. Now back to your regularly scheduled quibbling.
My first exposure to his work was the now infamous exchange with Torvalds. Without knowing enough to make a sound technical judgement, I thought to myself "what a pompous academic ass!"
As time goes on, and I learn more, my respect for Tanenbaum has grown. I'm still too technically ignorant to have a strong opinion about kernel architecture, although I believe that both camps have migrated towards one another a bit ("monolithic" kernels with multiple threads, loadable modules, etc. It strikes me, in my vast blissful domain of ignorance, as an odd sort of parallel to the RISC v. CISC wars of yesteryear.)
My respect for Tanenbaum grew enormously with his response to the whole SCO situation. His responses to SCO's manipulations and the so-called "researcher" from the Alexis de Tocqueville institute were devastatingly clear, cogent, and lacking in pretense. He obviously has a good sense of humor.
Now electoral-vote.com. I've watched the site evolve, looked at the data, and was impressed by the dedication of the person assembling it. Learning that it was Tanenbaum behind it has cemented my appreciation of the man.
Depends on the kind of radar, and the techniques used.
If they're doing Synthetic Aperture interferometry (i.e., multiple pass analysis), they can get range, azimuth, and phase, which can give outstanding accuracy (see, for example, Zebker and Goldstein's Topographic Mapping From Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar Observations, Journal of GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, Vol. 91, NO. B5, pp. 4993-4999, Apr., 1986)
There's a decent online summary of the technique at http://www.gisdevelopment.net/aars/acrs/1997/ts6/t s6006.shtml
Now, since it's a spaceship fly-by, there's not as much chance for doing interferometry. You still have pretty good ranging signals. I don't know the accuracy in terms of meters, though.
I think they'll be doing SAR interferometry at some point in the project, but not yet. I think they'll do it from orbit, like Magellan did over Venus.
While it's true that the new techniques are better for detecting lies made up on the spot, they still fail against someone who has thought up, "visualized", and/or gone over their story before.
The brain is complicated, but one thing that's becoming clear is that it's not good at differentiating input sources. Without extensive training, it can be unreliable. That's where all the "false memory" stuff comes from and where the pre-visualization "success!" techniques come from. If you visualize something sufficiently, your brain can become convinced it occured. You can even experience this inadvertently: most people have experienced confusion whether events from dreams were real -- this, of course, is the marginal case; sometimes there is certainty, one way or the other, but whether that certainty reflects reality is another issue.
I don't recall the exact study, but there was one of the conformity analyses where a single test individual was in a room of people who were part of the study. Colors were shown, and everyone would say the name of the color. When they showed a green square, everyone said "purple." Some of the time, the tested individual would go along with the group, and say "purple" the next time the green square was shown. However, a month after the test, a high percentage of the test individuals *remembered* the square as being purple, even the individuals who had said "green." The active part of the brain (according to CAT or PET scans) was memory recall.
I actually may be conflating two studies here, but I think this was the gist. *ding!* No, really. *ding!* crap. Caught again. When I search I find Moscovici which is sort of like the color part of this, and Hoffman, H.G., Granhag, P. A., See, S. T. K., & Loftus, E. F. (2001), Social influences on reality-monitoring decisions. Memory & Cognition, 29, 394-404, which is about external influencing of memory. I'm sure there's more out there...
Evidently, some pathological liars basically tell themselves stories, and happen to believe them at the time of retelling. Their brain activity is indistinguishable from remembering, even though it's fiction, because they have convinced themselves.
I've done a bunch of digital timelapse. Clouds are some of the best stuff, although pictures of flowers opening or groups of people doing different activities (parties, paying bills, etc) are amusing. I tend to do timelapse with frame capture rates between 20 seconds and 5 minutes.
Some of them are online.
Oh, boy, am I asking for a slashdotting? This is being hosted on a 300 MHz K7 on a 768 kilobit DSL line. I'll play it conservatively: just search google for webbwerks and timelapse. That should cut down the traffic a bit.
What *are* they teaching in the schools these days?
Pol Pot was born in Cambodia, and educated in France. See? There you have that connection you've been looking for -- that axis of evil running straight from Phnom Penh through Paris.
I ain't gonna say it's impossible, but it may not be as easy as you think.
For sufficient resistance to punctures, you can't just divide the gas chamber in half. Buoyant gasses likely won't have enough displacement to keep up a craft that's only half-full.
So say you divide the chamber into quarters. Probably three-quarters load of gas is sufficent displacement to keep the blimp up... well, the blimp that you had before you added the weight of the material used to divide the chamber, that is.
Whatever you're using to divide your chamber has to be fairly strong. Perhaps it need not be as strong as the exterior skin, since it doesn't have to resist direct weather and small bits of crap bouncing off it, but it does have to hold off the pressure of all that gas when one of the subchambers gets evacuated. Say it's half as heavy as the material of the blimp's skin. Assuming it's a sphere for ease of computation, your surface area of the blimp is 4(pi)r^2. Each division is (pi)r^2 material. We've assumed this material is half as heavy as the skin material, but we're using two dividers, so that cancels out. By dividing your chamber into four, you've just added a 25% to the material weight of your blimp. Is 75% of the gas volume sufficient to support 125% of the original weight?
Anyway, you get the picture. I don't know the buoyancy required at those elevations, but I could probably do the math eventually.
You know, I've run into that handlebar moustache guy myself.
I think he hangs out not only at Americans For The Environment meetings, but also the ANSWER meetings, Socialist Republicans of America meetings, DEFCON, Grassroot Activists for Pat Robertson meetings, AFGNWOW (Americans for Getting Nuclear War Over With) gatherings, and Moontribe Pow-wows.
Slashdot Mirror
Given your name, we can forgive you.
But make sure the applications you use have good standards for import/export, or are open source with comprehensible code in a language for which you have some hope of proficiency.
Otherwise, when the application programmer goes away, or the company goes out of business, you can be stranded with your data in a lot of obscure (probably binary) formats that are now useless. Of course, you only discover this kind of thing after an OS upgrade or something that breaks the old application...
No, no, no!
Cash that you printed yourself on a printer that someone else paid for in whatever way they felt like it.
Just don't let 'em know you're using their printer.
Or something.
Valve is selling an unrestricted copy of the game with no limits applied to it.
Are you sure?
I'm not saying you necessarily need a license to use copyrighted material. I'm saying that a company can sell a software license as opposed to software ownership.
While I'm not a lawyer, I believe that a company can sell a license that restricts your rights with regard to the product. Now, if it's not in the fine print on the outside of the box or the media envelope, you may well be right. I don't know if anyone has ever contested the "shrinkwrap" licenses on the envelope containing the actual media just because the license was not also on the outside of the box.
I don't want an annual pass to HL2. I want to own HL2.
Yes, and I want a lot of things myself... unlimited political power... throngs and bevies of hot lust-filled babes following me around... 10 teraflop notebook computer that weighs 6 ounces ... etc.
It doesn't look like Valve is selling ownership. They're selling a usage license, evidently. It's unfortunate, but that's the way it is.
Doh!
After further testing, well, it is in fact just me.
As pointed out by "Mr. Perl Foo," the more general approach of looking at $cell->{Val} will work correctly for either.
My humble apologies to both the OO Team and the author of ParseExcel for casting unwarranted aspersions.
No logic?
Sure there is! But the logic just happens to have a lot of exceptional cases.
"In the computer world, a standard is a rule followed except most of the time." -- William Abikoff
Same with grammar.
Yes, but even thought the language has a nasty syntax, it's certainly no harder to learn than, say, the complexities of regular expressions.
As for the errors, I guess it depends on how you parse "customer's recommendations." I was uncharitable in my parsing, since the patent involved was about purchase-based recommendations, not customer-created recommendations.
And hell, I'm a churlish curmudgeon, and felt like being a nitpicker. Sue me. Or mod me down.
Good God.
How many apostrophe errors can you fit into a single sentence?
No wonder the Liberal Arts types have such scorn for geeks. We're supposedly all about logic and process, but can't even manage simple grammar rules.
If I wrote code like that, my compiler would have me taken out and shot.
I haven't exhaustively tested the situation yet.
I just came across it yesterday, and haven't had a chance to do a rigorous test to prove that it's not something stupid I'm doing in my code.
I was actually hoping that Wisdom of Slashdot would descend upon me, and someone would say "you *did* remember to [whatever I'm forgetting], didn't you?" so I could just say "doh!" and get my code to work. I'll be digging deeper in the next couple of days, and will be able to report back then.
Is it just me, or does Open Office write something into its Excel-formatted files that breaks the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel package on CPAN?
I find that some cells return the content type rather than the content when retrieving $cell->Value
(e.g., "GENERAL" rather than "foo", which is the cell contents).
If I use a spreadsheet saved from Excel it works; if I read it into OO, and save it out, I experience the problem.
This is under Perl 5.8.1mumble on Mac OS X.
Did the earth move for you too?
It wasn't really my intent to blame the standard. I just have the experience of having to implement pages that work on those legacy browsers. So I have to adopt a hybrid approach.
Unfortunately, those "couple of rogue companies" you mention happen to completely dominate the browser market. With any luck, Moz/Firefox/Konq et al will change that. But for now, like it or not, I have to be able to work with IE.
You've obviously never had to maintain somebody else's tables-based code...
Point taken. People can make some pretty ugly tables. I've seen 'em and loathed 'em. And, getting back to the grandparent's point, some programs can generate some vile HTML.
What's so hard about...
Consider a case where you have three-column interface, different background shades for each column, all with a header and footer div. Oh, and it all wants to be centered in the browser window. Sure, it should be as easy as the example you provide, but IE has serious problems with floats within, say, the center column (i.e., subcolumns). It's not a problem with the standard. It's a problem with the implementations of the standard. But I'm stuck supporting that implementation.
Wow. So I've gone from giving my opinions on the relative strengths and weaknesses of CSS and tables, to being unethical, irresponsible, and promising the impossible. Gotta love Slashdot.
In any case, I think you're reading a lot into my comments that is not what I intended to express. Fine, I'm not the most articulate writer in the world. Whatever. Fundamentally, we're actually pretty close to agreement, and if you weren't so anxious to paint me as some kind of an ignorant and deceptive idiot, I'd be interested in continuing this conversation to clarify those points. But, as it happens, you is and so I ain't.
I guess it all comes down to requirements. When you have clients who demand things work in IE 5.0, you really worry about bad CSS implementations. Most table issues have been worked out by browsers with versions > 4, or only happen with deep nesting.
Generally, I work with layouts that a single table would handle, or, perhaps, one level of nesting. In most cases, it's trivial to do in CSS. In some cases, it's quite difficult (see below).
What's so hard about setting a width and floating it off to the side? For the vast majority of layouts, CSS is straightforward.
Once again, what's straightforward is relative. For example, making a three-column layout with a header div and a footer div, and which centers in the user's browser window, requires a lot of silly things like negative padding. Sure, you can say "but don't do that!" Unfortunately, my job is usually to implement someone else's design, and that someone else works with the person who pays the bills.
CSS does not give you this. HTML certainly doesn't give you this either, the whole idea of "control" is antithetical to the web.
Of course. The whole idea behind HTML was easy, device independent markup. Now welcome to the real world of clients. You can build them what they want, or you can watch them go to some other developer with their money.
The fact is, CSS gives you pixel-level control within some fairly rigid constraints. If you're working with IE 6 and Mozilla, you can provide a precise layout (assuming, as you point out, that the user does not override it).
you know the 'C' in 'CSS' stands for "cascading"
Golly. And here I was, stupidly thinking it stood for "Condescending."
If you want control, the web isn't the right medium for you.
Nice sentiment, and, on a technical level I agree. If I could, I'd be spending all my time doing the interesting work in the back-end using well-designed frameworks, designing a efficient database schemas, and then just throwing simple tabular interfaces on 'em. But once again, welcome to my real world. Clients hire me to put their applications online. They have strong ideas about how things should look, and it's not my place to tell them that they can't do what they want. I can give suggestions, I can make recommendations, but in the end, the design is their decision. If it's a truly technical issue (i.e., "but people will mis-use that application to send spam!), I can insist. When it comes to layout, I can't.
CSS gives me pixel-level control for an agreed-upon requirement set. That really sums it up for me. CSS is a tool that saves me time and makes for faster loading pages. It doesn't solve all problems for all situations. And frankly, I can be nondogmatic. I use a mix of both CSS and tables -- whatever works best and requires the least effort.
- CSS *sucks* for cross-browser compatibility. It takes a lot of work, and still will not support legacy browsers.
- Easy, since all the programs do it, and we've all been doing it since 1995. How tricky could <TR><TD> etc get?
- Multi-column layouts without intense pain. CSS can do this, but you have to play silly games.
Reasons to use CSS:- Separates the design into a cachable file. Faster load times.
- Your HTML pages will be tiny. And probably usable on wierd devices. Again, faster load times.
- Skinnable sites, based on arbitrary criteria (server side or client side).
- Control. If you want pixel-level control, you can have it. At a price. And if you don't care about legacy browsers.
- Easier to change layouts generated by code. Change the stylesheet, not the code. I found this important when working on a site that statically built large numbers of pages and took a long time to create.
- Elitist Wankerdom. You know you want to be an Elitist Wanker like the rest of us. If you can't sling acronyms like CSS and XSLT (oooh!), you just have to face up to the fact that you suck.
There you go folks. A handy guide. Now back to your regularly scheduled quibbling.OK. I'll admit it.
My first exposure to his work was the now infamous exchange with Torvalds. Without knowing enough to make a sound technical judgement, I thought to myself "what a pompous academic ass!"
As time goes on, and I learn more, my respect for Tanenbaum has grown. I'm still too technically ignorant to have a strong opinion about kernel architecture, although I believe that both camps have migrated towards one another a bit ("monolithic" kernels with multiple threads, loadable modules, etc. It strikes me, in my vast blissful domain of ignorance, as an odd sort of parallel to the RISC v. CISC wars of yesteryear.)
My respect for Tanenbaum grew enormously with his response to the whole SCO situation. His responses to SCO's manipulations and the so-called "researcher" from the Alexis de Tocqueville institute were devastatingly clear, cogent, and lacking in pretense. He obviously has a good sense of humor.
Now electoral-vote.com. I've watched the site evolve, looked at the data, and was impressed by the dedication of the person assembling it. Learning that it was Tanenbaum behind it has cemented my appreciation of the man.
Depends on the kind of radar, and the techniques used.
t s6006.shtml
If they're doing Synthetic Aperture interferometry (i.e., multiple pass analysis), they can get range, azimuth, and phase, which can give outstanding accuracy (see, for example, Zebker and Goldstein's Topographic Mapping From Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar Observations, Journal of GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, Vol. 91, NO. B5, pp. 4993-4999, Apr., 1986)
There's a decent online summary of the technique at http://www.gisdevelopment.net/aars/acrs/1997/ts6/
Now, since it's a spaceship fly-by, there's not as much chance for doing interferometry. You still have pretty good ranging signals. I don't know the accuracy in terms of meters, though.
I think they'll be doing SAR interferometry at some point in the project, but not yet. I think they'll do it from orbit, like Magellan did over Venus.
Well, yes and no.
While it's true that the new techniques are better for detecting lies made up on the spot, they still fail against someone who has thought up, "visualized", and/or gone over their story before.
The brain is complicated, but one thing that's becoming clear is that it's not good at differentiating input sources. Without extensive training, it can be unreliable. That's where all the "false memory" stuff comes from and where the pre-visualization "success!" techniques come from. If you visualize something sufficiently, your brain can become convinced it occured. You can even experience this inadvertently: most people have experienced confusion whether events from dreams were real -- this, of course, is the marginal case; sometimes there is certainty, one way or the other, but whether that certainty reflects reality is another issue.
I don't recall the exact study, but there was one of the conformity analyses where a single test individual was in a room of people who were part of the study. Colors were shown, and everyone would say the name of the color. When they showed a green square, everyone said "purple." Some of the time, the tested individual would go along with the group, and say "purple" the next time the green square was shown.
However, a month after the test, a high percentage of the test individuals *remembered* the square as being purple, even the individuals who had said "green." The active part of the brain (according to CAT or PET scans) was memory recall.
I actually may be conflating two studies here, but I think this was the gist. *ding!* No, really. *ding!* crap. Caught again. When I search I find Moscovici which is sort of like the color part of this, and Hoffman, H.G., Granhag, P. A., See, S. T. K., & Loftus, E. F. (2001), Social influences on reality-monitoring decisions. Memory & Cognition, 29, 394-404, which is about external influencing of memory. I'm sure there's more out there...
Evidently, some pathological liars basically tell themselves stories, and happen to believe them at the time of retelling. Their brain activity is indistinguishable from remembering, even though it's fiction, because they have convinced themselves.
I've done a bunch of digital timelapse. Clouds are some of the best stuff, although pictures of flowers opening or groups of people doing different activities (parties, paying bills, etc) are amusing. I tend to do timelapse with frame capture rates between 20 seconds and 5 minutes.
Some of them are online.
Oh, boy, am I asking for a slashdotting? This is being hosted on a 300 MHz K7 on a 768 kilobit DSL line. I'll play it conservatively: just search google for webbwerks and timelapse. That should cut down the traffic a bit.
'Scuse me, I'm going to go and pray now.
Pol Pot from Mainland China?
What *are* they teaching in the schools these days?
Pol Pot was born in Cambodia, and educated in France. See? There you have that connection you've been looking for -- that axis of evil running straight from Phnom Penh through Paris.
Well ...
... well, the blimp that you had before you added the weight of the material used to divide the chamber, that is.
I ain't gonna say it's impossible, but it may not be as easy as you think.
For sufficient resistance to punctures, you can't just divide the gas chamber in half. Buoyant gasses likely won't have enough displacement to keep up a craft that's only half-full.
So say you divide the chamber into quarters. Probably three-quarters load of gas is sufficent displacement to keep the blimp up
Whatever you're using to divide your chamber has to be fairly strong. Perhaps it need not be as strong as the exterior skin, since it doesn't have to resist direct weather and small bits of crap bouncing off it, but it does have to hold off the pressure of all that gas when one of the subchambers gets evacuated. Say it's half as heavy as the material of the blimp's skin. Assuming it's a sphere for ease of computation, your surface area of the blimp is 4(pi)r^2. Each division is (pi)r^2 material. We've assumed this material is half as heavy as the skin material, but we're using two dividers, so that cancels out. By dividing your chamber into four, you've just added a 25% to the material weight of your blimp. Is 75% of the gas volume sufficient to support 125% of the original weight?
Anyway, you get the picture. I don't know the buoyancy required at those elevations, but I could probably do the math eventually.
Jack Womack would come in to break up the fight, and then kick both their asses just to prove a point.
You know, I've run into that handlebar moustache guy myself.
I think he hangs out not only at Americans For The Environment meetings, but also the ANSWER meetings, Socialist Republicans of America meetings, DEFCON, Grassroot Activists for Pat Robertson meetings, AFGNWOW (Americans for Getting Nuclear War Over With) gatherings, and Moontribe Pow-wows.
I also sat next to him at a wedding recently.
Scary.
If it's a burning question ... ... well, whomever you last laid wasn't telling you the truth when he/she said "but it's all cleared up now!"