Lubricants can be done effectively without oil these days, most of the companies that sell motor oil provide at least one line of synthetic oil.
You misunderstand the meaning of "synthetic" oils. They are synthetic in that they are lab-created from stock ingredients to specific and precise formulations, rather than refined directly from crude oil as in a "traditional" oil. That said, the base stock chemicals still come from petroleum, such as an alkene, an ester, or the newer gas-to-liquid where a light-chain gas fraction is separated, hydrated and catalyticaly converted into a desired liquid.
The advantages of synthetic oils are that you can pretty much completely eliminate undesirable compounds, and you can precisely tailor chemical ratios to achieve a desired behavior. Neither of those are possible/feasible with distillation, since a "bad" compound might have a boiling point within a hair-fraction of a degree of something "good", and a lot of different "good-for-different-purposes" chemicals have very close boiling points as well.
You are right about plastics being relatively easy to make from non-petroleum carbon sources -IIRC the first plastic was made from cellulose- but there are many types of plastic that can't be made with something that simple/natural, and don't even get me started on the problems of using corn for bio-fuels and carbon stock. There are better plants, but that's what you get for letting Iowa choose the presidential candidates.
Considering how omnipresent Flash is today, in good and bad implementations*, why did MS decide to make Silverlight and push it so hard? I've read a bit about it, but I missed the boat on the big publicity when it was first announced. To me it just seems like a Flash-clone, not something new and innovative.
Is this just classical MS jealousy over seeing someone else dominate a market and wanting that market, even if they don't already compete there? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish etc
Are there any web developers excited over advantages over flash? Or is it just one of those thing you'll have to learn because MS is shoveling it on you?
I'm actually curious as to what people think here.
*there are times I think it's used just because some PHB wants to "have flash" on the page e.g. flash buttons for simple hyperlinks
I JUST turned 28 yesterday, so I clicked on the listen file to see if I could hear it.
I turned my speakers up just a bit (from an almost muted level) before hitting play, and I actually shouted in pain when it started. I'm REALLY glad I wasn't wearing my headphones.
So if you're curious like I was... start with the volume OFF, and bring it up SLOW.
If I walked by one of these things, a metal protective grating wouldn't stop me from trying to smash the $@!& out of it.
I think I found a better solution: an aerosol can of expanding foam insulation would quickly cover it through any metal grate. Once the foam dries, it would muffle the sound and it's really hard to pry it off:)
*NOTE* I have wimpy $15 Altec Lansing desktop speakers that were turned almost all the way down for late night WoW - one more little twist down and they would in fact be OFF. I have seen a good number of loud bands in concert, sometimes right in front of the speakers.
I don't know if by reffering to it as Rhodesia you are merely showing your age, or making some oblique reference to white rule... but your point stands for Zimbabwe. Mugabe has wrecked a jewel of a country.
South Africa, however, is more complicated than that. On one hand, I can easily point to SA's vastly increased integration into the global market since the end of apartheid, higher economic growth, lower inflation, better, more equitable access to social services and improvements in education... I'd call all that pretty solid "development"
On the other hand, things aren't exactly rosy today. HIV/AIDS is still rampant, unemployment and crime are unacceptably high. Refugees from neighboring countries compete for what jobs exist and drain resources, urbanization is increasing pressure on infrastructure etc.
All in all, is it a better South Africa than it was 15 years ago? I'd say yes, better, certainly more "developed", but crazier because of all the problems still facing the people.
Africa is a tough place, but the difference between struggling-but-working South Africa and rock-bottom-crisis Zimbabwe is the difference between democracy and dictatorship
I have personally seen this in action. A few villages over from where I was living in Africa there was a fertile patch of land that was a tomato producing machine, and I mean buckets-and-bushels -piled-high-year-round kind of production. One guy with no other job (like most) figured out that he could make money transporting tomatoes if he bought cheap at the source and sold them in town at the going rate. The bulk rate fluctuated at either end, and it was only worth his time when the prices were right, but that is where the cell phone came in (motorized transport costs would have eaten any profit and it was a grueling bike-ride/push).
Even though he didn't do it more than a few times, I was impressed with the idea.
And I still have no idea how they grew so many bloody tomatoes in that place. It was insane
Now you may have been joking, but as a former Peace Corps Volunteer, I think I can safely speak for all Peace Corps Volunteers, past and present:
UP YOURS!
That kind of bullshit, paranoid thinking reared it's head at me and some of my friends through our service. Rumors get spread, and some un-trusting chap would come up and confront one of us for being an "agent" of the USA, and accuse us of plotting nebulous, vague "bad" things in projects like, oh say BOOKS FOR THE SCHOOL, or TEACHING PEOPLE TO MAKE JAM. It didn't matter that the person couldn't make a logical connection between JAM/BOOKS and EVIL, their trust was broken. Trust that is hard enough to earn in the first place. Trust is what keeps a volunteer safe. (Not to sound melodramatic, but off the top of my head I can think of at least one situation I was in where my life might have been in danger had some paranoid-ass started saying I was CIA.)
The Peace Corps goes to great lengths to distance itself from any inkling of spying. If a person has ever been in an intelligence gathering position, they can pretty much kiss their chances of volunteering goodbye. After you have volunteered, you are PREVENTED from taking any job in the intelligence services for something like 5 years at a minimum. Volunteers are not allowed to make political statements relating to the host country, and are discouraged from pretty much anything political in nature i.e, do it and you could go home. There is no fucking spying going on in the Peace Corps.
If you still don't believe me, let me clue you in on a non-secret: Peace Corps volunteers by and large get sent to rural areas. Why the fuck would the CIA or NSA give a rats ass about what is going on in some forgotten backwater of a country, let alone care enough to put a covert agent there for extended time? As for the few volunteers who go to large cities, there would be no need for a "Peace Corps cover" with all the other options (State Department, USAID etc), and a Peace Corps cover would be a pretty shitty one at that, because you probably wouldn't get a ton of useful intel out of schoolchildren and aids patients.
While I admire your idealism here, I was never endorsing the idea that selling guns is fundamentally good in any way, I don't believe that. I was simply saying that you cannot take away or prevent the guns and expect the result magically to be peace.
Guns are tools, tools that can be used for murder, but as Africa in particular has shown us, people can and do commit murder and atrocities on epic scales without guns.
Jamani! Hata mimi, nilikaa Newala 05-07, nawe? Niliondoka kabla ya safari yako. Pole sana. Medivac, umeme, moyo, etc.
Too much of the old Kiswahili will probably invoke the wrath of mods, but I'd bet we know a lot of the same people. This is too crazy. What sites did you visit when you were there?
but I lived in an African Village with no running water or electricity (90% of the time ) for 2 years. (Raise your hands RPCVs)
I had 3 (count them, one two THREE!) cell phone towers within sight of my house, and I could always hear the diesel generators at night if the winds lulled.
Would I have traded the cell phone for reliable electricity or running water?
HELL NO.
Cell phones improved my life and the life of the other people there tremendously. Electricity is about 1,000,000 times more expensive to cook with than charcoal, and kerosene lamps and candles make plenty of light. Water was scarce, but I had a no-flush pit toilet and an in ground rain-catch cistern for water. I only really used about 60l a week. The real problem was that not enough people had big enough cisterns (20% maybe), and many people had none. Water ran out in places at times, people suffered when they couldn't wash or bath as often, but no one ever died of dehydration for lack of a drink. If 60% of the houses had big cisterns, it would solve that problem.
Life without electricity and running water can be just fine. What is really needed is healthcare.
The hospital didn't have a single actual doctor after the foreign volunteer left. Pretty much everyone who walked in was told they had malaria and treated for it regardless. People suffered and died frequently from stupid, easily treated things. THAT was -IS- a tragedy.
I'm forgoing using my shiny new Mod-points to say- ^^This^^
Look at Kenya, once a bastion of African stability (corruption not withstanding). Pretty much the nicest, most progressive and most developed sub-Saharan country in Africa, second only to SA (and what Zimbabwe once was)
In the space of a few weeks, they went from stability to killing each other with pangas, bows and arrows. Guns aren't the problem.
If you take off your rose coloured glasses, you'd realize that the Dual-Shock is a kludge, a very bad kludge in which analog sticks were slapped on to the original Playstation controller and rushed out the door with little or no design consideration.
Sony shit a brick when they found out about the N64 controller design, and they had to respond with something ASAP. After they saw how well it was integrated with the N64, they feared the lack of analog would hobble the PS. They rushed out the dual-shock in very little time, it was on the shelves around a year after the 64 was released. By the design, you can infer that they were still not fully committed to analog, since the analog sticks are literally tacked on to the bottom
If you still don't want to see the light, just look at how every other console manufacturer has done it. Sega Saturn & Dreamcast, Gamecube, Xbox & 360. Everyone else swapped the D-pad and left analog BECAUSE IT WORKS BETTER!
As funny as that is, it raises an interesting prospect: The Warcraft lore and brand are immensely popular and well developed. At the same time, everyone got tired of seeing *yet.another.WWII.shooter* but the "modern" war shooters aren't fundamentally that different.
If they could work together to make some sort of Warcraft themed massively multi-player FPS, I'd be on that like stink on poo. Different classes that are *actually* different, instead of just one guy having a bigger gun and more ammo. It would be hard to balance since it would probably play quite differently than the current WWII formula, but it would be sweet.
For direct liquid-on-skin exposure, yes- less than 100mcg is quite leathal, but that is now how VX is delivered as a weapon. It is a possible handling accident scenario though. For inhalation, the dose is estimated (obviously this hasn't been tested on humans in a controlled trial) around 30-50 mg*min/m^3. So it's really just semantics:) I think we can agree it is pure nasty.
You've obviously never been around a farm where ammonia tanks are kept. Hell, I probably fart more than 2ppm! A quick google check gives exposure limits of 25-300ppm depending on regulation authority and exposure type, and the LC50 for a mouse was over 5000ppm@1 hour!
I know a grizzled old farmer who could take a deep breath of fresh air, and without a mask or goggles, shut off a valve when some meth-head broke in and left one open. He'd done it multiple times. Granted, the guy is a complete badass, but still, ammonia is safe enough to use as a household cleaner (albeit not anhydrous).
You want real chemical weapons? I was an EMT near the Umatilla Chemical Weapons depot, home of a lot of the USA's nastiest chemical weapons. Things that will kill in 100 mgs or less. (VX, GB etc, now being safely disposed of). We had the atropine injectors on standby for disasters, and given the deteriorating state of the bunkers and munitions, that's a good thing.
Might be. The only engineers I know that work there work on the fabrication side, not the design side, so it's entirely possible that a lot of the new chip design is coming from Israel.
Still, once you have a design, there is a ton of work getting the manufacturing process streamlined and getting wafer yields as high as possible. This is especially true when moving to a new process like from 65nm to 45nm as they are now (and 32nm in the future). This work I believe is being done at the Oregon fab.
"Unless microsoft bribes every game companies out there, i think they will stick with directx 9 support or maybe we'll get some other software that unleashes the full power of games,,,maybe someone is already setting a direct10 clone out there that runs on Windows Xp."
Once upon a time, a little thing called OpenGLhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL/ was fairly common. It was shiny and pretty and played equally well with Windows, Mac and Linux. Over time, Direct3D lured devs away. Mac and Linux users cried and there was a gnashing of teeth as games never released for their OS. A few stalwart folks like those at Id and Epic stuck with OpenGL and made some of the best looking games around. IIRC, the current version of OpenGL can do everything that DirectX 10 can.
With the Mac and Linux user base growing and with so many people sticking with XP, I can imagine that devs will start looking more seriously at using OpenGL engines like the Unreal Engine 3 and Id Tech for new games. Cake for everyone!
I seem to recall several "enthusiast" sites bragging about over-clocking the stock Intel Core-2s to 3.2GHz on air cooling, even higher with water or other, but I'm not an over-clocking expert.
Can someone please explain how this is "better"? How big of an impact will the faster FSB have? Will it allow you to run memory at insane speeds, and is there even RAM available that can handle those speeds?
He would say that silicon fabs are built all over the world; AMD has relatively few fabs and the flagship one is in Germany right now.
However, that does not make AMD a German company and that being said, Intel* is firmly based in the USA. I live a few minutes from Intel's testing & research fab in Oregon, and the Corporate Headquarters is in California (not too far from the AMD headquarters)
*they own the personal computer CPU world, AMD is a much smaller competitor.
To keep this on-topic somewhat: Teh Chinese R in r base, steelinz r sub planz! LOLZ!!!1!eleventy!!
But seriously, they did publish photos of classified sub propellers on Google Earth.
While I understand the value behind an all volunteer force, I've always thought there was something of value in systems of compulsory service like Israel and Switzerland, i.e. if you don't want to be a combatant, you can opt for non-combat duty. Everyone still gives a contribution of some sort, be it cook, driver, nurse, janitor/maintenance etc thus the combatants (who chose combat) can operate at best efficiency without worrying about non-combat details.
It seems to me that this is a good compromise between drafting people and coercing them to fight like the US did in Vietnam, and relying solely on volunteers for the whole operation of the military.
Plus it would eliminates much (but probably not all) the cultural and economic disparity in the ranks. If Johnny Megabucks had to serve next to William Poorhouse, as equals, it just might make the USA a better country.
/considering a military career for grad school, but not only for financial motives. There are other ways to pay.
Bravo, AC, Bravo. I was going to say much the same thing, albeit maybe less bluntly. However, I would add this to the above:
Everyone I have heard espouse the "loving Earth/Gaia" bit lives a comfortable, relatively modern life. Mother Earth loves you plenty when you have electricity, running water and stores full of food.
Take that away and get real close to Mother Earth. I've been there: Mother Earth may still love you, but the bitch will try her best to kill you at every opportunity.
After reading through Facebook's terms of use, I came across this little gem:
By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.
To my non-lawyer mind, this seems to me like they own anything you post, bar none, full stop. They can use it however and for whatever they like and you can go cry to mommy if you don't like it.
I see the part where it says you may remove the "User Content" and the license automatically expires, but how does this jive with an "irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid [and] worldwide license" and "...the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content"? (Emphasis mine)
Am I wrong in assuming that Facebook can use your material however they please, sell rights to use it to whomever they want, and will retain those rights indefinitely? I'm far from a professional photographer, but I have a friend on Facebook who is an aspiring pro-photographer. I don't want my pictures used without my knowledge, but I could live with it. My buddy would be far more impacted if one of his pictures started making money for someone else and not him.
So, do I have anything to worry about here? Should I tell my buddy not to post his "professional" pictures? I can understand that there must be some sort of agreement made to host content, but this all just seems too draconian. Do other dedicated photo-sharing sites like Flikr have better terms that don't walk all over you?
Slashdot Mirror
Lubricants can be done effectively without oil these days, most of the companies that sell motor oil provide at least one line of synthetic oil.
You misunderstand the meaning of "synthetic" oils. They are synthetic in that they are lab-created from stock ingredients to specific and precise formulations, rather than refined directly from crude oil as in a "traditional" oil. That said, the base stock chemicals still come from petroleum, such as an alkene, an ester, or the newer gas-to-liquid where a light-chain gas fraction is separated, hydrated and catalyticaly converted into a desired liquid.
The advantages of synthetic oils are that you can pretty much completely eliminate undesirable compounds, and you can precisely tailor chemical ratios to achieve a desired behavior. Neither of those are possible/feasible with distillation, since a "bad" compound might have a boiling point within a hair-fraction of a degree of something "good", and a lot of different "good-for-different-purposes" chemicals have very close boiling points as well.
You are right about plastics being relatively easy to make from non-petroleum carbon sources -IIRC the first plastic was made from cellulose- but there are many types of plastic that can't be made with something that simple/natural, and don't even get me started on the problems of using corn for bio-fuels and carbon stock. There are better plants, but that's what you get for letting Iowa choose the presidential candidates.
It's a Mel Brooks and Dave Chappelle combo reference: it's the punch-line to the GP's ending words, and it fits in fine with the topic of Wii-jokes.
It's better to mod up than down, unless it's truly egregious.
Please, save your points: don't mod down if you don't get the joke
But extreme is not XTREME!!1!
If he wants an xtreme victory, he needs to hire Xtreme Lawyers .
Considering how omnipresent Flash is today, in good and bad implementations*, why did MS decide to make Silverlight and push it so hard? I've read a bit about it, but I missed the boat on the big publicity when it was first announced. To me it just seems like a Flash-clone, not something new and innovative.
Is this just classical MS jealousy over seeing someone else dominate a market and wanting that market, even if they don't already compete there? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish etc
Are there any web developers excited over advantages over flash? Or is it just one of those thing you'll have to learn because MS is shoveling it on you?
I'm actually curious as to what people think here.
*there are times I think it's used just because some PHB wants to "have flash" on the page e.g. flash buttons for simple hyperlinks
I JUST turned 28 yesterday, so I clicked on the listen file to see if I could hear it.
:)
I turned my speakers up just a bit (from an almost muted level) before hitting play, and I actually shouted in pain when it started. I'm REALLY glad I wasn't wearing my headphones.
So if you're curious like I was... start with the volume OFF, and bring it up SLOW.
If I walked by one of these things, a metal protective grating wouldn't stop me from trying to smash the $@!& out of it.
I think I found a better solution: an aerosol can of expanding foam insulation would quickly cover it through any metal grate. Once the foam dries, it would muffle the sound and it's really hard to pry it off
*NOTE* I have wimpy $15 Altec Lansing desktop speakers that were turned almost all the way down for late night WoW - one more little twist down and they would in fact be OFF. I have seen a good number of loud bands in concert, sometimes right in front of the speakers.
I don't know if by reffering to it as Rhodesia you are merely showing your age, or making some oblique reference to white rule... but your point stands for Zimbabwe. Mugabe has wrecked a jewel of a country.
South Africa, however, is more complicated than that. On one hand, I can easily point to SA's vastly increased integration into the global market since the end of apartheid, higher economic growth, lower inflation, better, more equitable access to social services and improvements in education... I'd call all that pretty solid "development"
On the other hand, things aren't exactly rosy today. HIV/AIDS is still rampant, unemployment and crime are unacceptably high. Refugees from neighboring countries compete for what jobs exist and drain resources, urbanization is increasing pressure on infrastructure etc.
All in all, is it a better South Africa than it was 15 years ago? I'd say yes, better, certainly more "developed", but crazier because of all the problems still facing the people.
Africa is a tough place, but the difference between struggling-but-working South Africa and rock-bottom-crisis Zimbabwe is the difference between democracy and dictatorship
I have personally seen this in action. A few villages over from where I was living in Africa there was a fertile patch of land that was a tomato producing machine, and I mean buckets-and-bushels -piled-high-year-round kind of production. One guy with no other job (like most) figured out that he could make money transporting tomatoes if he bought cheap at the source and sold them in town at the going rate. The bulk rate fluctuated at either end, and it was only worth his time when the prices were right, but that is where the cell phone came in (motorized transport costs would have eaten any profit and it was a grueling bike-ride/push).
Even though he didn't do it more than a few times, I was impressed with the idea.
And I still have no idea how they grew so many bloody tomatoes in that place. It was insane
Now you may have been joking, but as a former Peace Corps Volunteer, I think I can safely speak for all Peace Corps Volunteers, past and present:
UP YOURS!
That kind of bullshit, paranoid thinking reared it's head at me and some of my friends through our service. Rumors get spread, and some un-trusting chap would come up and confront one of us for being an "agent" of the USA, and accuse us of plotting nebulous, vague "bad" things in projects like, oh say BOOKS FOR THE SCHOOL, or TEACHING PEOPLE TO MAKE JAM. It didn't matter that the person couldn't make a logical connection between JAM/BOOKS and EVIL, their trust was broken.
Trust that is hard enough to earn in the first place.
Trust is what keeps a volunteer safe.
(Not to sound melodramatic, but off the top of my head I can think of at least one situation I was in where my life might have been in danger had some paranoid-ass started saying I was CIA.)
The Peace Corps goes to great lengths to distance itself from any inkling of spying. If a person has ever been in an intelligence gathering position, they can pretty much kiss their chances of volunteering goodbye. After you have volunteered, you are PREVENTED from taking any job in the intelligence services for something like 5 years at a minimum. Volunteers are not allowed to make political statements relating to the host country, and are discouraged from pretty much anything political in nature i.e, do it and you could go home. There is no fucking spying going on in the Peace Corps.
If you still don't believe me, let me clue you in on a non-secret: Peace Corps volunteers by and large get sent to rural areas. Why the fuck would the CIA or NSA give a rats ass about what is going on in some forgotten backwater of a country, let alone care enough to put a covert agent there for extended time? As for the few volunteers who go to large cities, there would be no need for a "Peace Corps cover" with all the other options (State Department, USAID etc), and a Peace Corps cover would be a pretty shitty one at that, because you probably wouldn't get a ton of useful intel out of schoolchildren and aids patients.
Sorry, but that really touched a nerve.
While I admire your idealism here, I was never endorsing the idea that selling guns is fundamentally good in any way, I don't believe that. I was simply saying that you cannot take away or prevent the guns and expect the result magically to be peace.
Guns are tools, tools that can be used for murder, but as Africa in particular has shown us, people can and do commit murder and atrocities on epic scales without guns.
Jamani! Hata mimi, nilikaa Newala 05-07, nawe? Niliondoka kabla ya safari yako. Pole sana. Medivac, umeme, moyo, etc.
Too much of the old Kiswahili will probably invoke the wrath of mods, but I'd bet we know a lot of the same people. This is too crazy. What sites did you visit when you were there?
but I lived in an African Village with no running water or electricity (90% of the time ) for 2 years. (Raise your hands RPCVs)
I had 3 (count them, one two THREE!) cell phone towers within sight of my house, and I could always hear the diesel generators at night if the winds lulled.
Would I have traded the cell phone for reliable electricity or running water?
HELL NO.
Cell phones improved my life and the life of the other people there tremendously. Electricity is about 1,000,000 times more expensive to cook with than charcoal, and kerosene lamps and candles make plenty of light. Water was scarce, but I had a no-flush pit toilet and an in ground rain-catch cistern for water. I only really used about 60l a week. The real problem was that not enough people had big enough cisterns (20% maybe), and many people had none. Water ran out in places at times, people suffered when they couldn't wash or bath as often, but no one ever died of dehydration for lack of a drink. If 60% of the houses had big cisterns, it would solve that problem.
Life without electricity and running water can be just fine. What is really needed is healthcare.
The hospital didn't have a single actual doctor after the foreign volunteer left. Pretty much everyone who walked in was told they had malaria and treated for it regardless. People suffered and died frequently from stupid, easily treated things. THAT was -IS- a tragedy.
I'm forgoing using my shiny new Mod-points to say- ^^This^^
Look at Kenya, once a bastion of African stability (corruption not withstanding). Pretty much the nicest, most progressive and most developed sub-Saharan country in Africa, second only to SA (and what Zimbabwe once was)
In the space of a few weeks, they went from stability to killing each other with pangas, bows and arrows. Guns aren't the problem.
If you take off your rose coloured glasses, you'd realize that the Dual-Shock is a kludge, a very bad kludge in which analog sticks were slapped on to the original Playstation controller and rushed out the door with little or no design consideration.
Sony shit a brick when they found out about the N64 controller design, and they had to respond with something ASAP. After they saw how well it was integrated with the N64, they feared the lack of analog would hobble the PS. They rushed out the dual-shock in very little time, it was on the shelves around a year after the 64 was released. By the design, you can infer that they were still not fully committed to analog, since the analog sticks are literally tacked on to the bottom
If you still don't want to see the light, just look at how every other console manufacturer has done it. Sega Saturn & Dreamcast, Gamecube, Xbox & 360. Everyone else swapped the D-pad and left analog BECAUSE IT WORKS BETTER!
Chuck a joke? The Norris is never a joke, he is only ever the punch
/don't forget to tip your waitress
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As funny as that is, it raises an interesting prospect: The Warcraft lore and brand are immensely popular and well developed. At the same time, everyone got tired of seeing *yet.another.WWII.shooter* but the "modern" war shooters aren't fundamentally that different.
If they could work together to make some sort of Warcraft themed massively multi-player FPS, I'd be on that like stink on poo. Different classes that are *actually* different, instead of just one guy having a bigger gun and more ammo. It would be hard to balance since it would probably play quite differently than the current WWII formula, but it would be sweet.
For direct liquid-on-skin exposure, yes- less than 100mcg is quite leathal, but that is now how VX is delivered as a weapon. It is a possible handling accident scenario though. For inhalation, the dose is estimated (obviously this hasn't been tested on humans in a controlled trial) around 30-50 mg*min/m^3. So it's really just semantics :) I think we can agree it is pure nasty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VX_(nerve_agent)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umatilla_Chemical_Depot
You've obviously never been around a farm where ammonia tanks are kept. Hell, I probably fart more than 2ppm! A quick google check gives exposure limits of 25-300ppm depending on regulation authority and exposure type, and the LC50 for a mouse was over 5000ppm@1 hour!
I know a grizzled old farmer who could take a deep breath of fresh air, and without a mask or goggles, shut off a valve when some meth-head broke in and left one open. He'd done it multiple times. Granted, the guy is a complete badass, but still, ammonia is safe enough to use as a household cleaner (albeit not anhydrous).
You want real chemical weapons?
I was an EMT near the Umatilla Chemical Weapons depot, home of a lot of the USA's nastiest chemical weapons. Things that will kill in 100 mgs or less. (VX, GB etc, now being safely disposed of). We had the atropine injectors on standby for disasters, and given the deteriorating state of the bunkers and munitions, that's a good thing.
Might be. The only engineers I know that work there work on the fabrication side, not the design side, so it's entirely possible that a lot of the new chip design is coming from Israel.
Still, once you have a design, there is a ton of work getting the manufacturing process streamlined and getting wafer yields as high as possible. This is especially true when moving to a new process like from 65nm to 45nm as they are now (and 32nm in the future). This work I believe is being done at the Oregon fab.
"Unless microsoft bribes every game companies out there, i think they will stick with directx 9 support or maybe we'll get some other software that unleashes the full power of games,,,maybe someone is already setting a direct10 clone out there that runs on Windows Xp."
Once upon a time, a little thing called OpenGLhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL/ was fairly common. It was shiny and pretty and played equally well with Windows, Mac and Linux. Over time, Direct3D lured devs away. Mac and Linux users cried and there was a gnashing of teeth as games never released for their OS. A few stalwart folks like those at Id and Epic stuck with OpenGL and made some of the best looking games around. IIRC, the current version of OpenGL can do everything that DirectX 10 can.
With the Mac and Linux user base growing and with so many people sticking with XP, I can imagine that devs will start looking more seriously at using OpenGL engines like the Unreal Engine 3 and Id Tech for new games. Cake for everyone!
I seem to recall several "enthusiast" sites bragging about over-clocking the stock Intel Core-2s to 3.2GHz on air cooling, even higher with water or other, but I'm not an over-clocking expert.
Can someone please explain how this is "better"? How big of an impact will the faster FSB have?
Will it allow you to run memory at insane speeds, and is there even RAM available that can handle those speeds?
He would say that silicon fabs are built all over the world; AMD has relatively few fabs and the flagship one is in Germany right now.
However, that does not make AMD a German company and that being said, Intel* is firmly based in the USA. I live a few minutes from Intel's testing & research fab in Oregon, and the Corporate Headquarters is in California (not too far from the AMD headquarters)
*they own the personal computer CPU world, AMD is a much smaller competitor.
That is what he might say.
To keep this on-topic somewhat: Teh Chinese R in r base, steelinz r sub planz! LOLZ!!!1!eleventy!!
But seriously, they did publish photos of classified sub propellers on Google Earth.
While I understand the value behind an all volunteer force, I've always thought there was something of value in systems of compulsory service like Israel and Switzerland, i.e. if you don't want to be a combatant, you can opt for non-combat duty. Everyone still gives a contribution of some sort, be it cook, driver, nurse, janitor/maintenance etc thus the combatants (who chose combat) can operate at best efficiency without worrying about non-combat details.
It seems to me that this is a good compromise between drafting people and coercing them to fight like the US did in Vietnam, and relying solely on volunteers for the whole operation of the military.
Plus it would eliminates much (but probably not all) the cultural and economic disparity in the ranks. If Johnny Megabucks had to serve next to William Poorhouse, as equals, it just might make the USA a better country.
And I clean my own fish
Bravo, AC, Bravo. I was going to say much the same thing, albeit maybe less bluntly. However, I would add this to the above:
Everyone I have heard espouse the "loving Earth/Gaia" bit lives a comfortable, relatively modern life. Mother Earth loves you plenty when you have electricity, running water and stores full of food.
Take that away and get real close to Mother Earth. I've been there: Mother Earth may still love you, but the bitch will try her best to kill you at every opportunity.
I have a question for the lawyers here:
After reading through Facebook's terms of use, I came across this little gem:
By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.
To my non-lawyer mind, this seems to me like they own anything you post, bar none, full stop. They can use it however and for whatever they like and you can go cry to mommy if you don't like it.
I see the part where it says you may remove the "User Content" and the license automatically expires, but how does this jive with an "irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid [and] worldwide license" and "...the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content"? (Emphasis mine)
Am I wrong in assuming that Facebook can use your material however they please, sell rights to use it to whomever they want, and will retain those rights indefinitely? I'm far from a professional photographer, but I have a friend on Facebook who is an aspiring pro-photographer. I don't want my pictures used without my knowledge, but I could live with it. My buddy would be far more impacted if one of his pictures started making money for someone else and not him.
So, do I have anything to worry about here? Should I tell my buddy not to post his "professional" pictures? I can understand that there must be some sort of agreement made to host content, but this all just seems too draconian. Do other dedicated photo-sharing sites like Flikr have better terms that don't walk all over you?