First American carrier to use an american-built plane made mostly of composite materials.
Don't get me wrong, Carbon Fiber is absurdly strong, and computer models help negate design flaws.... but CF's failure mode tends to be sudden and...explosive. Steel bends long before it breaks, and Aluminum is somewhere in the middle, but CF just.... goes when it fails. I think Airbus has been including CF on their tail fins for a while (with some failures) and the technology is supposedly mature... but it's hard to ignore Aluminum's nearly 100 year reputation. Maybe I'm just getting old.
The true beauty of carbon fiber is the behavior in repeated cyclic loads. Cracks in aluminum grow at even the lowest stress levels, reducing the total strength of the part over time, but in CF the cracks do not grow at all. Think of the many fibers as multiple redundant load paths - this makes CF extremely safe if you stay below the maximum possible stress. And reduces the insane inspection overhead which the use of aluminum incurs.
Your aluminum part will have long snapped due to fatigue when that oh so nasty CF failure occurs eventually.
Craig Venter should be close to be able to tailor an organism which can survive on Mars and start terraforming the planet, so in future it has more atmosphere and can help to heat the planet for future colonisation.
Now that would be a worthwhile endeavor. This teleporting thing is just headline-grabbing and has no scientific merit.
It looks like samsung ships 20 to 45 million smart phones and tablets per quarter. If so then 1 billion is less than ten bucks per phone, possibly way less.
Wow - is this the math they teach you in school these days? Please at least do a cursory check before posting rubbish like that!
Explanation, because you really might not get this yourself: To fall below $10 per phone, at least 100 million phones must be sold. Now factor in that Samsung sells most of their phones with razor-slim margins to carriers, and the $20 to $50 which is really involved is a multiple of their margin.
by choosing a mate which we like. Good looks and a compatible character are the biggest factors in choosing a partner with which to reproduce. Consequently, we try to increase these desired traits in our offspring.
The question is only when we start to be open about it and try to influence the genetic composition of our kids more directly,
Choosing a spouse is very different from genetically engineering a baby. One of the differences is that genetic engineering is far faster and more radical, not leaving time for society to adjust. It could create a race of intelligent and strong (but not necessarily moral) beings in a few generations. See http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3056849&cid=41035551
In true Slashdot fashion, you have not read the article and now think you know it all. But it is not about genetic engineering, it is about avoiding known and harmful genetic variations. And that is *exactly* what we do and why we are so picky about our partners. Please do yourself a favor and read up on evolutional psychology.
Who knows - by actually reading the article and some comprehension of the subject, you may in future write a comment which actually enhances the discussion?
Yes, right. And the idea has been demonized since, mainly to justify a war which was waged to bring the US economy out of recession and suppress the two most potent economic competitors. When we outgrow the propaganda from that time, we might get a clearer look on that issue.
by choosing a mate which we like. Good looks and a compatible character are the biggest factors in choosing a partner with which to reproduce. Consequently, we try to increase these desired traits in our offspring.
The question is only when we start to be open about it and try to influence the genetic composition of our kids more directly,
I must respectfully ask that you refrain from insulting weasels in such a crude way. This is a public forum after all and it is patently unfair to compare such a noble animal to the likes of a corporate executive.
You are absolutely right. Thank you for enlightening me. I made a terrible mistake and will not do so again, promised!
So, they gave you your money back, adjusted for inflation? And that money covered the price of the whole bike, and not just the frame? If so, that sounds pretty reasonable. What more could they do (other than perhaps compensate you for the time it took to get them to honor their warranty)?
No, no, I never got anything back moneywise, only letters which said they are sorry. Yeah, right.
Please try to understand what I wrote literally, and do not interpret it they way you want. I got an inflated *price*, not an inflated refund. I hope the difference is clear.
After all, they had my money already and saw me as a nuisance.
In the workplace we have learned to trust our employers just for the duration of the current project, if at all. Why would you now expect a faceless entity run by weasels to be any different?
I have learned this also the hard way. I once bought a Peugeot bicycle with a lifetime warranty for the frame, which duly broke a few years after. I first wrote Peugeot, and they pointed me at their French headquarters. I wrote them, even in French, and was referred to the bike dealer, where the circle continued. Long story short: I never got anything for my warranty besides the inflated price for the bike and the lesson what a lifetime warranty is *really* worth these days.
I will never again buy something again from Peugeot, but they sure couldn't care less. The government covers their losses anyway.
Also, I never heard of the properties of plastic changing just from melting and re-extruding them. Maybe it is just a scale issue, where small scale reprocessing creates an inferior filament.
Then you are not listening to the right people, those who know their stuff. Plastics are long chain molecules, and extrusion involves high shear forces at high temperatures, cracking those chains.
Next, these molecules need stabilizers to protect them from UV light and oxygen radicals. Those are also damaged in the melting and re-extrusion process. Either you add more of them, or permanently degrade the material.
Environmentally-responsible airplane that can also carry a wicked-heavy bomb....*sigh*
Trust me, bombs will still be delivered by high-speed vehicles. This plane is for observation, so the bomber knows where to drop its load. Environmentally-friendly observation, that is.
I am surprised that no poster so far mentioned the Boeing Condor. Same layout, same propulsion concept, same mission, only a different fuel this time. I guess some guys at Boeing never stopped working on this plane.
Saw the video of it taking off.. was on a cart until lift off leaving the only obvious wheels behind. So how does it land? didn't see anything on the page about that.
Given that 4 days worth of fuel will add a lot to the mass of the plane, the gear is designed for the landing mass only, thus being much lighter than one capable to carry the take-off weight. The cart adds some handling complexity, but this seems to be worth the mass savings.
... but this is nothing new.
Guess why Steve Jobs made long walks when he had difficult problems to solve. Not being locked into the same room, but with new impressions all the time, the mind receives new inspirations, instead of following the same path of thoughts over and over.
Receiving an extra dose of oxygen comes as a bonus on top. Many original thinkers have used techniques like this over the years.
Sorry, you [citation needed] nazis. Look up the references yourselves. Ideally while being on a long walk, not sitting at the same desk the whole day.
Seriously, at the current failure rate of flight-rated systems components the realistic time aloft (while allowing for peacetime failure rates) would be measured in days, or a few weeks at best. Only doubling and tripling redundancy levels will push this limit out, and this is getting less and less effective, because you will have more and more components which can (and will at some point) fail.
A better approach is to increase the reliability of the parts, but this means spending serious money and development time. It will always be cheaper to purchase a few more platforms and let them take turns in their observation duty.
No wonder that thing will not be put into service soon. It is not going to happen. The whole thing has probably only been studied to siphon off more money from clueless military administrators.
The chord blood freezing business is mostly a money making scare tactic. As many other posters pointed out, the chance of it being needed is negligible.
What's proven by many studies, however, is the beneficial effect on the immune system of keeping the umbilical connected and free of clamps for several minutes after birth.
To all those "citation needed" nazis: You must be new here. The effect had been the topic of at least one news item here before.
We don't steal technological information from China because right now, they don't have anything we don't already have. We haven't been solidly behind another nation on that one since the mid 19th century. Tied, maybe; behind, no.
And in the mid-19th century, we didn't have the slightest qualm about using industrial espionage against British companies to give our domestic industry a leg up. And why should we, for that matter?
What a load of US-centic jingoism!
What about jet engines? You had to borrow them from Britain first and then needed Germans to build them in the US (Gerhard Neumann). What about rockets? Same thing here (von Braun and his team). Even such mundane things like butter production were revolutionized after the US learned about all the German technology after 1945.
I am sure there are some technological gems in some corners in China which are already superior to all US tech. And they get bigger and more numerous, not least because of an attitude like yours.
And what about Fuji? They do plenty of digital stuff, but you can still buy their film. TFA doesn't mention what they did differently.
Fuji lives in the middle of many electronics companies, all potential or actual suppliers of all kinds of digital camera parts. Kodak, however, lived in upstate New York, in a Kodak company town (Rochester), and their potential suppliers for digital products a continent away.
Government regulations and laws do the opposite of what free market does. Free market improves everybody's conditions, government deteriorates everybody's conditions.
Please don't forget that you need a strong and active government to keep the market free. Otherways, you might end up with the sort of oligopoly and near monopoly that is prevalent in many US sectors now. Please note also that I am not talking about the kind of strong government which is burdening Russia today. A better example would be Norway. Or New Zealand. There are enough in this world to prove my point, just look around!
In the end it takes both: Free markets and benign government intervention.
well, well, well... now please try and forget all that propaganda that you have been fed about that war and the situation in Europe, and then read your post again.
Pretty embarrassing, isn't it?
Hint: Germany never hedged any plans to attack the USA before Pearl Harbour. Everything you think to know about this is propaganda. Read the recent history books, especially those which could use the Russian archives when they were (briefly) open under Boris Jeltsin. The Russians are *very* meticulous in their record keeping, it is all still there.
If you want to write a book, consider using Lyx (Link: http://www.lyx.org/Features) instead of Word 2010. It keeps track of all indexes, links, references, footnotes and TOCs, produces PDF output with links to everything you desire to cross-reference, and gives you a printed output much better than any version of Word. Give it a try!
We've seen this over and over again. Microsoft will just offer to give the software for free. They know that it's not in their best interest for it to become general knowledge how functional open-source alternative have become.
Did you notice that the issue is the hardware cost which is inherent with those updates? If they do not want to spend on the hardware upgrades, Linux will be hard to beat.
Couldn't they just transmit it as well as record it to the black box?
No. For example, if some aspect of an accident knocks out the transmitter or if nobody receives the data at a critical time. Usually, putting it in a black box in the plane works really well since it is hard to lose a plane. Possible, as in this case, but usually you can find the smoking crater where the plane crashed.
Rolls-Royce is doing this 24/7 with most of their engines. Why should this not be possible for the whole aircraft if an engine maker can do it? Airbus should do the monitoring, because they can profit from it by learning in real-time how their aircraft perform. They can sell this info to the airlines and help with the scheduling of maintenance, forwarding replacement parts even before the airplanes land and so on, just as Rolls-Royce does.
So why on Earth are planes designed so that pilots sit above the nose and can't see down, instead of below the nose and can't see up?
simple answer: When turning, the pilot really has to look up in order to look ahead. Increase the bank angle, and it becomes obvious: A steep turn is almost a looping, turned sideways.
Slashdot Mirror
First American carrier to use an american-built plane made mostly of composite materials. Don't get me wrong, Carbon Fiber is absurdly strong, and computer models help negate design flaws.... but CF's failure mode tends to be sudden and...explosive. Steel bends long before it breaks, and Aluminum is somewhere in the middle, but CF just.... goes when it fails. I think Airbus has been including CF on their tail fins for a while (with some failures) and the technology is supposedly mature... but it's hard to ignore Aluminum's nearly 100 year reputation. Maybe I'm just getting old.
The true beauty of carbon fiber is the behavior in repeated cyclic loads. Cracks in aluminum grow at even the lowest stress levels, reducing the total strength of the part over time, but in CF the cracks do not grow at all. Think of the many fibers as multiple redundant load paths - this makes CF extremely safe if you stay below the maximum possible stress. And reduces the insane inspection overhead which the use of aluminum incurs.
Your aluminum part will have long snapped due to fatigue when that oh so nasty CF failure occurs eventually.
Now that would be a worthwhile endeavor. This teleporting thing is just headline-grabbing and has no scientific merit.
No, you hang it from a satellite that is in geostationary orbit around the moon. No lagrange point needed.
Make this "lunarstationary orbit", and you are correct.
It looks like samsung ships 20 to 45 million smart phones and tablets per quarter. If so then 1 billion is less than ten bucks per phone, possibly way less.
Wow - is this the math they teach you in school these days? Please at least do a cursory check before posting rubbish like that!
Explanation, because you really might not get this yourself: To fall below $10 per phone, at least 100 million phones must be sold. Now factor in that Samsung sells most of their phones with razor-slim margins to carriers, and the $20 to $50 which is really involved is a multiple of their margin.
Choosing a spouse is very different from genetically engineering a baby. One of the differences is that genetic engineering is far faster and more radical, not leaving time for society to adjust. It could create a race of intelligent and strong (but not necessarily moral) beings in a few generations. See http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3056849&cid=41035551
In true Slashdot fashion, you have not read the article and now think you know it all. But it is not about genetic engineering, it is about avoiding known and harmful genetic variations. And that is *exactly* what we do and why we are so picky about our partners. Please do yourself a favor and read up on evolutional psychology.
Who knows - by actually reading the article and some comprehension of the subject, you may in future write a comment which actually enhances the discussion?
didn't the Nazis try this a few years back ??
Yes, right. And the idea has been demonized since, mainly to justify a war which was waged to bring the US economy out of recession and suppress the two most potent economic competitors. When we outgrow the propaganda from that time, we might get a clearer look on that issue.
The question is only when we start to be open about it and try to influence the genetic composition of our kids more directly,
I must respectfully ask that you refrain from insulting weasels in such a crude way. This is a public forum after all and it is patently unfair to compare such a noble animal to the likes of a corporate executive.
You are absolutely right. Thank you for enlightening me. I made a terrible mistake and will not do so again, promised!
So, they gave you your money back, adjusted for inflation? And that money covered the price of the whole bike, and not just the frame? If so, that sounds pretty reasonable. What more could they do (other than perhaps compensate you for the time it took to get them to honor their warranty)?
No, no, I never got anything back moneywise, only letters which said they are sorry. Yeah, right.
Please try to understand what I wrote literally, and do not interpret it they way you want. I got an inflated *price*, not an inflated refund. I hope the difference is clear.
After all, they had my money already and saw me as a nuisance.
I have learned this also the hard way. I once bought a Peugeot bicycle with a lifetime warranty for the frame, which duly broke a few years after. I first wrote Peugeot, and they pointed me at their French headquarters. I wrote them, even in French, and was referred to the bike dealer, where the circle continued. Long story short: I never got anything for my warranty besides the inflated price for the bike and the lesson what a lifetime warranty is *really* worth these days.
I will never again buy something again from Peugeot, but they sure couldn't care less. The government covers their losses anyway.
Also, I never heard of the properties of plastic changing just from melting and re-extruding them. Maybe it is just a scale issue, where small scale reprocessing creates an inferior filament.
Then you are not listening to the right people, those who know their stuff. Plastics are long chain molecules, and extrusion involves high shear forces at high temperatures, cracking those chains.
Next, these molecules need stabilizers to protect them from UV light and oxygen radicals. Those are also damaged in the melting and re-extrusion process. Either you add more of them, or permanently degrade the material.
The list goes on ...
Environmentally-responsible airplane that can also carry a wicked-heavy bomb....*sigh*
Trust me, bombs will still be delivered by high-speed vehicles. This plane is for observation, so the bomber knows where to drop its load. Environmentally-friendly observation, that is.
I am surprised that no poster so far mentioned the Boeing Condor. Same layout, same propulsion concept, same mission, only a different fuel this time. I guess some guys at Boeing never stopped working on this plane.
Saw the video of it taking off.. was on a cart until lift off leaving the only obvious wheels behind. So how does it land? didn't see anything on the page about that.
Given that 4 days worth of fuel will add a lot to the mass of the plane, the gear is designed for the landing mass only, thus being much lighter than one capable to carry the take-off weight. The cart adds some handling complexity, but this seems to be worth the mass savings.
Receiving an extra dose of oxygen comes as a bonus on top. Many original thinkers have used techniques like this over the years.
Sorry, you [citation needed] nazis. Look up the references yourselves. Ideally while being on a long walk, not sitting at the same desk the whole day.
A better approach is to increase the reliability of the parts, but this means spending serious money and development time. It will always be cheaper to purchase a few more platforms and let them take turns in their observation duty.
No wonder that thing will not be put into service soon. It is not going to happen. The whole thing has probably only been studied to siphon off more money from clueless military administrators.
What's proven by many studies, however, is the beneficial effect on the immune system of keeping the umbilical connected and free of clamps for several minutes after birth.
To all those "citation needed" nazis: You must be new here. The effect had been the topic of at least one news item here before.
We don't steal technological information from China because right now, they don't have anything we don't already have. We haven't been solidly behind another nation on that one since the mid 19th century. Tied, maybe; behind, no.
And in the mid-19th century, we didn't have the slightest qualm about using industrial espionage against British companies to give our domestic industry a leg up. And why should we, for that matter?
What a load of US-centic jingoism!
What about jet engines? You had to borrow them from Britain first and then needed Germans to build them in the US (Gerhard Neumann). What about rockets? Same thing here (von Braun and his team). Even such mundane things like butter production were revolutionized after the US learned about all the German technology after 1945.
I am sure there are some technological gems in some corners in China which are already superior to all US tech. And they get bigger and more numerous, not least because of an attitude like yours.
And what about Fuji? They do plenty of digital stuff, but you can still buy their film. TFA doesn't mention what they did differently.
Fuji lives in the middle of many electronics companies, all potential or actual suppliers of all kinds of digital camera parts. Kodak, however, lived in upstate New York, in a Kodak company town (Rochester), and their potential suppliers for digital products a continent away.
Government regulations and laws do the opposite of what free market does. Free market improves everybody's conditions, government deteriorates everybody's conditions.
Please don't forget that you need a strong and active government to keep the market free. Otherways, you might end up with the sort of oligopoly and near monopoly that is prevalent in many US sectors now. Please note also that I am not talking about the kind of strong government which is burdening Russia today. A better example would be Norway. Or New Zealand. There are enough in this world to prove my point, just look around!
In the end it takes both: Free markets and benign government intervention.
well, well, well ... now please try and forget all that propaganda that you have been fed about that war and the situation in Europe, and then read your post again.
Pretty embarrassing, isn't it?
Hint: Germany never hedged any plans to attack the USA before Pearl Harbour. Everything you think to know about this is propaganda. Read the recent history books, especially those which could use the Russian archives when they were (briefly) open under Boris Jeltsin. The Russians are *very* meticulous in their record keeping, it is all still there.
If you want to write a book, consider using Lyx (Link: http://www.lyx.org/Features) instead of Word 2010. It keeps track of all indexes, links, references, footnotes and TOCs, produces PDF output with links to everything you desire to cross-reference, and gives you a printed output much better than any version of Word. Give it a try!
We've seen this over and over again. Microsoft will just offer to give the software for free. They know that it's not in their best interest for it to become general knowledge how functional open-source alternative have become.
Did you notice that the issue is the hardware cost which is inherent with those updates? If they do not want to spend on the hardware upgrades, Linux will be hard to beat.
Couldn't they just transmit it as well as record it to the black box?
No. For example, if some aspect of an accident knocks out the transmitter or if nobody receives the data at a critical time. Usually, putting it in a black box in the plane works really well since it is hard to lose a plane. Possible, as in this case, but usually you can find the smoking crater where the plane crashed.
Rolls-Royce is doing this 24/7 with most of their engines. Why should this not be possible for the whole aircraft if an engine maker can do it? Airbus should do the monitoring, because they can profit from it by learning in real-time how their aircraft perform. They can sell this info to the airlines and help with the scheduling of maintenance, forwarding replacement parts even before the airplanes land and so on, just as Rolls-Royce does.
So why on Earth are planes designed so that pilots sit above the nose and can't see down, instead of below the nose and can't see up?
simple answer: When turning, the pilot really has to look up in order to look ahead. Increase the bank angle, and it becomes obvious: A steep turn is almost a looping, turned sideways.