Research into making more efficient and quieter propellers was conducted from the mid-70s to the mid-80s, because of the greater fuel efficiency of propellor-driven aircraft in light of the Arab oil embargo. This research led to the development of the 'propfan', a turboprop engine with wider, swept-back propeller blades. The Advanced Turboprop Project at NASA's Lewis Research Center's developed engine and propeller designs that would spark a resurgence of the turboprop era, but socio-economic factors -- primarily driven by a reduction in fuel costs, reducing the perception of any need for immediate and radical fuel conservation -- kept the new designs from making more than a peripheral entry to the aviation market. Many modern turboprop aircraft use propellers incorporating advances developed by the ATP, and the research contributed to the development of the high-bypass turbofan jet engines used in most modern airliners, but there was no significant return to the use of turboprop aircraft in commercial aviation. Research has continued, with some engine designs becoming more exotic, as in this image or this one, but commercial applications of the research continue to use ducted fan designs, such as the newest UHB (ultra-high bypass) turbofan designs. The designs produced by this research, however, bear sufficient similarities to the screw design in the satellite photo that it is clear that the same overall design considerations apply, subject to the differences in density, viscosity, and compressibility of the driving medium in each design case.
Looking at the picture, the screw on the boat looks remarkably like the designs from a couple of decades ago for high-efficiency, low-noise propellers for aircraft, where the blades wrapped backwards around the engine nacelle. The problem with aviation propellers is that to get more power, you can make the prop bigger in diameter, but eventually the tip speed reaches the speed of sound, which causes a huge increase in noise, vibration, and wear; a skewback propeller increases the driving surface while allowing the rotation speed of the prop to stay lower. The situation is just as important for submarine propellors, where the higher velocity of the outer edge of the screw will cause it to cavitate at a lower number of revolutions than the inner part, so you want to put more driving surface inside the critical diameter for the number of revolutions you expect to be making at cruising speeds.
And we now have the webvideo equivalent of the 'upcoming program advertisement' that broadcast and cable TV channels have taken to overlaying on program content, so that even if you record the program and view it later with a tool to skip the commercials, you can't avoid the in-program advertisements that can take up a sixth of your screen in bright, distracting colors (and, in some cases, sounds).
However, in this CNN article on the subject, it says that "the video owner can decline all ads or selected ones, such as those from competitors" -- although I'm not sure how the 'decline selected ads' mechanism would work; it sounds fiddly to set up individual exclusions when the video is uploaded. The ad placement is also going to be charged 'by the eyeball' -- a fee per presentation, not per clickthrough, which could make popular videos expensive to buy adspace on, and supposedly the video owner will receive a cut of the advertising revenue (details are not yet available), which gives them an incentive not to just check the "No advertising on this video" box when they upload the video. We will have to see what the video uploaders choose to do if they get a choice whether or not to have an ad slapped on top of their video, and whether YouTube will yank the option not to have any ads if too many people say they don't want ads on their videos.
To paraphrase the American officer speaking to journalist Peter Arnett during the Vietnam War about the destruction of Ben Tre, "We had to destroy your freedom in order to save it."
It will be interesting to see the effect of the RealID mandates on our court system if the federal courts are unable to get a sufficient pool of jurors due to people who are summoned to jury duty being turned away because they don't have "proper" ID when they go to the court building to present themselves for duty.
As an illustration of the premium you're paying for Alienware, a couple years ago I bought a Clevo D900K laptop from Leadcomp (branded as ProStar); the same laptop ODM design, configured identically, from Alienware was $700 more than I paid, and the only difference was that I had a square 'ProStar' logo on the top instead of a blue Alienware case top. Must be really high-grade plastic...
Re:BadAstronomy has covered it already...
on
3 Ton Meteorite Stolen
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Actually, there is some conjecture that the meteorite may have been found, but not obtained. See this BBC science article; the premise is that Lake Cheko near the center of the region displays an unusual bottom formation with an anomalous feature about 10m down that might be a meteorite fragment. A fair degree of controversy exists, and an expedition is planned in 2008 to drill down to the anomaly to determine whether it is meteoritic in nature, which would settle the question.
But after all, isn't stopping file sharing an integral part of the War On Terror? If we cease our eternal vigilance against these evil people, our American way of life will be destroyed by the flood of shoddy knockoffs of CDs and DVDs. And after all, isn't a little bit of presumed guilt worth knowing that your next purchase of a music CD is, as it should, going straight into the coffers of a legitimate recording studio, rather than to some pirate or -- *gasp* -- the musician.
-- And remember, boys and girls -- "We had to destroy your freedom in order to save it."
To date, the Harry Potter books have sold more then 300 million copies worldwide in over 200 countries and the books have been translated into more than 60 languages - only the bible can better those statistics.
Actually, according to the Guinness World Record people, L. Ron Hubbard beats J. K. Rowling, with his work translated into 65 languages: "This new world record, officially verified as 65 languages, exceeds the previous record of 51 languages set in 1997 by American author Sidney Sheldon. It also tops the unofficial count of 63 for "Harry Potter" novelist J. K. Rowling and the 64 languages translated for "The Diary of a Young Girl" by Dutch teenager Anne Frank."
That depends on the musicians. Despite the inroads that the RIAA's standard 'jerk-the-musician-over' contract (I remember hearing a piece on NPR where a musician described how an album she'd recorded with a major recording house had sold something like 200,000 copies at ~$20 per CD, but the recording house claimed that they still hadn't made back her advance in profits, so she wasn't earning royalties, but an album that she'd recorded on her own and was selling on the Net for $9.50 for the CD had rolled over into the green in about two months) have made on it, musicians' big income has always been from touring. And it depends on the genre; different genres of music will have different average rates of musicians giving live performances.
While the pictures on the auction page include one that shows the frame of the machine with the eagle-and-swastika stamp mark impressed into it, I think that because of the small size of the stamp and the perception of the Enigma machine as being a significant historical artifact rather than memorabilia of the Nazi party, that eBay considers it acceptable.
It's a somewhat higher hurdle to jump, in that it requires a constitutional amendment to remove the prohibition against ex post facto laws, but once that obstacle is overcome, then the past collections of data become a gold mine for anyone looking to find some illegal activity to use against an opponent.
My intention was not to refute his point, but rather to point out that the concerns Heinlein wrote his characters as having regarding incest were those relating to the potential harm it could cause to any offspring from such a relationship, not those social and cultural edicts which prohibit inbreeding in the same categories of kin forbidden by incest rules. You will note that pedophilic incest is completely absent in Heinlein's fiction -- all of the characters so involved are adults, able to make their own informed and considered decisions about who they want to have sex with; there are no instances of adult-child incest in his writing. In the case of Lazarus sleeping with his mother, she is already pregnant in their first encounter, so there is no possibility of conception, and after her rescue, they have access to genetic screening to ensure that any child would be healthy -- as do Lazulei and Lorelei, his 'sisters'.
Inbreeding has been known for millennia as the best method of reinforcing desired traits in a breeding line; the corollary is that it also reinforces recessives that you don't want, which must be culled from the population. However, this very reinforcement, if culling is performed, rapidly washes these recessives from the population. Once genetic screening becomes available in Heinlein's 'Future History', that process of culling is performed without producing children expressing those reinforced recessives -- at which point any eugenic purpose behind an incest taboo ceases to exist, leaving it only as a social convention. It is also worth pointing out that Lazarus Long, in "Methuselah's Children", refuses the advances of 'one of his granddaughters, four times removed', claiming as justification the vestiges of the Bible-Belt morality he was raised under; it is only by two thousand years later that he is seen to have overcome that upbringing. His mother, who takes him to bed despite believing him to be her half-brother, claims that she 'fears the damage incest can do, both genetically and socially', but repeatedly shows that it is the genetic aspects that are her primary concern.
2) Its one thing for an author to explore a 'taboo', particularly in hard SF. However, Heinlein explored incest a little more zealously. To the point it was pretty much a given in anything he wrote as he got older that wasn't aimed explicitly at kids.
It wasn't -just- Time Enough For Love. It was Time Enough for Love, The Number of the Beast, Farnham's Freehold, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, Job, The Cat who Walks Through Walls, All You Zombies... etc...
I would point out that he also wrote, in Time Enough for Love, in "The Tale of the Twins Who Weren't", how Lazarus Long, when he found himself in 'possession' of a pair of slaves, brother and sister, actively discouraged them from having sex, illustrating the reinforcement of recessives with a card game that he deliberately cheated at. It was only after he discovered that they were complementary twins and were thereby incapable of reinforcing any recessive genes that he stopped objecting to the two of them having sex.
I remember when I first heard about the offense referred to as DWB ('Driving While Black'); this is just a new and slightly modified form of the same 'not whitebread, therefore presumed to be suspicious' kneejerk...
My father retired from the Navy and went to work for one of the government contractors in the area; he wound up going through seven jobs in six years, because every time that a contract ended, the company would lay off all but the top three or four managers from the project, and he'd have to find another employer. After that, he decided to go back to work for the Navy as a civil servant (amusingly, winding up working about fifty yards from where I worked (having gotten hired as a civil servant for the Navy when I got out of college), and eventually retired from civil service. Working for a company that depends on government contracts for its operations is a chancy business until you've got enough experience that you're on the high end of the pile when the cuts go in when the contract ends.
Welcome to Rivendell... ...Mister Anderson. You know the thing I hate about elves? It's the smell. "Okay, so Hugo Weaving as Elrond sticks out a bit." I feel saturated by it...
The comparison is not bogus, the author explicitly stated he was comparing Macs to brand name PCs. Home built PCs being cheaper doesn't disprove his assertion. Your same home built PC is cheaper than brand name PCs too.
The question of 'brand name', though, is misleading when it comes to laptops, because there are only a few ODM (Original Design Manufacturers) who actually make laptops, selling them to companies that rebrand them under their own logo and sell them. For example, when I bought my laptop, the ODM design was the D900K, manufactured by Clevo (dual-core Athlon laptop). The actual laptop is branded ProStar; however, the D900K was also being sold by other brands, such as Sager and Alienware, who offered the D900K as the Aurora m7700 -- for a price, configured identically to the ProStar model I bought, that was $700 higher; all I would have gotten for that $700 was the Alienware name and a blue plastic Alienware-style case top. So comparisons against a 'brand name' PC laptop are not always indicative of anything except the price you pay for the brand name
Wouldn't it also be safe to say that most scientists, regardless of their desire to be "open minded", start with the presupposition that there is no God? Or, "Wow, look at this big hole, I wonder how it was made in keeping with the idea that there is no God"?
Or, more accurately, "Look at this big hole; how could it have been made through the actions of known physical processes" as compared against "Look at this big hole; how could it have been made if we posit the existence of an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, nonmaterial entity? But, then, how do we prove the existence of this entity?"
One of these days someone is going to come up with a game that both supports MMOG play but also has a single player campaign running on a mini-server. This title will rule the RPG world until someone brings out one that lets you run your own server, and create a portal from the mmog to your server (the portal simply doesn't appear unless your server is up; it could even be flickery if you have a poor history of uptime.)
One thing that we have all learned from the mod communities in this world is that players want open-ended, customizable games.
Unfortunately for this concept, the fundamental principle of MMOs is "don't trust the client" -- as soon as you put game data on the client; it becomes hackable by the end users. For example, in NCSoft's City of Heroes, even though all the character data is stored on the server, world textures and sounds are stored on the client; fairly shortly after the introduction of exploration badges and history plaques to the game, there was a 'map patch' that would show, on your in-game map, the location of all the badges and plaques in each zone, so you could find them easier. Now, this doesn't affect the actual game mechanics, but think of the possibilities for hacking and duping that would exist if an MMO publisher let character data get off of its server onto a server controlled by a player and then accepted it back again. The rapidity with which unscrupulous players would have their characters off to custom hackservers to get outfitted with all the 'phat lewt' would make your head spin.
but I think it's a little unfair to have managers who have little or no experience in the respective field.
Many of the most hideous inefficiencies in modern businesses, particularly in technical industries, stem from the premise that modern management theory allows a properly-trained manager to manage any business process, regardless of whether or not they have any familiarity or understanding with that process. in 1942, George O. Smith's 'Venus Equilateral' story "QRM - Interplanetary" illustrated what an "efficiency expert" could do by coming in and upsetting practices that were worked out empirically as being the most efficient, but which look wasteful to someone without the knowledge to judge properly. And 'efficient management' becomes the province of business-administration graduates, because the people who are doing the technical jobs are doing it because it's what they want to do and don't want to be managers, which would take them away from what they want to be doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Research into making more efficient and quieter propellers was conducted from the mid-70s to the mid-80s, because of the greater fuel efficiency of propellor-driven aircraft in light of the Arab oil embargo. This research led to the development of the 'propfan', a turboprop engine with wider, swept-back propeller blades. The Advanced Turboprop Project at NASA's Lewis Research Center's developed engine and propeller designs that would spark a resurgence of the turboprop era, but socio-economic factors -- primarily driven by a reduction in fuel costs, reducing the perception of any need for immediate and radical fuel conservation -- kept the new designs from making more than a peripheral entry to the aviation market. Many modern turboprop aircraft use propellers incorporating advances developed by the ATP, and the research contributed to the development of the high-bypass turbofan jet engines used in most modern airliners, but there was no significant return to the use of turboprop aircraft in commercial aviation. Research has continued, with some engine designs becoming more exotic, as in this image or this one, but commercial applications of the research continue to use ducted fan designs, such as the newest UHB (ultra-high bypass) turbofan designs. The designs produced by this research, however, bear sufficient similarities to the screw design in the satellite photo that it is clear that the same overall design considerations apply, subject to the differences in density, viscosity, and compressibility of the driving medium in each design case.
Looking at the picture, the screw on the boat looks remarkably like the designs from a couple of decades ago for high-efficiency, low-noise propellers for aircraft, where the blades wrapped backwards around the engine nacelle. The problem with aviation propellers is that to get more power, you can make the prop bigger in diameter, but eventually the tip speed reaches the speed of sound, which causes a huge increase in noise, vibration, and wear; a skewback propeller increases the driving surface while allowing the rotation speed of the prop to stay lower. The situation is just as important for submarine propellors, where the higher velocity of the outer edge of the screw will cause it to cavitate at a lower number of revolutions than the inner part, so you want to put more driving surface inside the critical diameter for the number of revolutions you expect to be making at cruising speeds.
And we now have the webvideo equivalent of the 'upcoming program advertisement' that broadcast and cable TV channels have taken to overlaying on program content, so that even if you record the program and view it later with a tool to skip the commercials, you can't avoid the in-program advertisements that can take up a sixth of your screen in bright, distracting colors (and, in some cases, sounds).
However, in this CNN article on the subject, it says that "the video owner can decline all ads or selected ones, such as those from competitors" -- although I'm not sure how the 'decline selected ads' mechanism would work; it sounds fiddly to set up individual exclusions when the video is uploaded. The ad placement is also going to be charged 'by the eyeball' -- a fee per presentation, not per clickthrough, which could make popular videos expensive to buy adspace on, and supposedly the video owner will receive a cut of the advertising revenue (details are not yet available), which gives them an incentive not to just check the "No advertising on this video" box when they upload the video. We will have to see what the video uploaders choose to do if they get a choice whether or not to have an ad slapped on top of their video, and whether YouTube will yank the option not to have any ads if too many people say they don't want ads on their videos.
To paraphrase the American officer speaking to journalist Peter Arnett during the Vietnam War about the destruction of Ben Tre, "We had to destroy your freedom in order to save it."
It will be interesting to see the effect of the RealID mandates on our court system if the federal courts are unable to get a sufficient pool of jurors due to people who are summoned to jury duty being turned away because they don't have "proper" ID when they go to the court building to present themselves for duty.
As an illustration of the premium you're paying for Alienware, a couple years ago I bought a Clevo D900K laptop from Leadcomp (branded as ProStar); the same laptop ODM design, configured identically, from Alienware was $700 more than I paid, and the only difference was that I had a square 'ProStar' logo on the top instead of a blue Alienware case top. Must be really high-grade plastic...
Nor is it in the 'soap with a sermon'.
Actually, there is some conjecture that the meteorite may have been found, but not obtained. See this BBC science article; the premise is that Lake Cheko near the center of the region displays an unusual bottom formation with an anomalous feature about 10m down that might be a meteorite fragment. A fair degree of controversy exists, and an expedition is planned in 2008 to drill down to the anomaly to determine whether it is meteoritic in nature, which would settle the question.
But after all, isn't stopping file sharing an integral part of the War On Terror? If we cease our eternal vigilance against these evil people, our American way of life will be destroyed by the flood of shoddy knockoffs of CDs and DVDs. And after all, isn't a little bit of presumed guilt worth knowing that your next purchase of a music CD is, as it should, going straight into the coffers of a legitimate recording studio, rather than to some pirate or -- *gasp* -- the musician.
--
And remember, boys and girls -- "We had to destroy your freedom in order to save it."
But that ignores the fundamental question about him.... which, unfortunately, we're not likely to find out: Will He Blend?
Actually, according to the Guinness World Record people, L. Ron Hubbard beats J. K. Rowling, with his work translated into 65 languages: "This new world record, officially verified as 65 languages, exceeds the previous record of 51 languages set in 1997 by American author Sidney Sheldon. It also tops the unofficial count of 63 for "Harry Potter" novelist J. K. Rowling and the 64 languages translated for "The Diary of a Young Girl" by Dutch teenager Anne Frank."
That depends on the musicians. Despite the inroads that the RIAA's standard 'jerk-the-musician-over' contract (I remember hearing a piece on NPR where a musician described how an album she'd recorded with a major recording house had sold something like 200,000 copies at ~$20 per CD, but the recording house claimed that they still hadn't made back her advance in profits, so she wasn't earning royalties, but an album that she'd recorded on her own and was selling on the Net for $9.50 for the CD had rolled over into the green in about two months) have made on it, musicians' big income has always been from touring. And it depends on the genre; different genres of music will have different average rates of musicians giving live performances.
While the pictures on the auction page include one that shows the frame of the machine with the eagle-and-swastika stamp mark impressed into it, I think that because of the small size of the stamp and the perception of the Enigma machine as being a significant historical artifact rather than memorabilia of the Nazi party, that eBay considers it acceptable.
We can always hope that implementing this will introduce them to Major Disaster...
It's a somewhat higher hurdle to jump, in that it requires a constitutional amendment to remove the prohibition against ex post facto laws, but once that obstacle is overcome, then the past collections of data become a gold mine for anyone looking to find some illegal activity to use against an opponent.
My intention was not to refute his point, but rather to point out that the concerns Heinlein wrote his characters as having regarding incest were those relating to the potential harm it could cause to any offspring from such a relationship, not those social and cultural edicts which prohibit inbreeding in the same categories of kin forbidden by incest rules. You will note that pedophilic incest is completely absent in Heinlein's fiction -- all of the characters so involved are adults, able to make their own informed and considered decisions about who they want to have sex with; there are no instances of adult-child incest in his writing. In the case of Lazarus sleeping with his mother, she is already pregnant in their first encounter, so there is no possibility of conception, and after her rescue, they have access to genetic screening to ensure that any child would be healthy -- as do Lazulei and Lorelei, his 'sisters'.
Inbreeding has been known for millennia as the best method of reinforcing desired traits in a breeding line; the corollary is that it also reinforces recessives that you don't want, which must be culled from the population. However, this very reinforcement, if culling is performed, rapidly washes these recessives from the population. Once genetic screening becomes available in Heinlein's 'Future History', that process of culling is performed without producing children expressing those reinforced recessives -- at which point any eugenic purpose behind an incest taboo ceases to exist, leaving it only as a social convention. It is also worth pointing out that Lazarus Long, in "Methuselah's Children", refuses the advances of 'one of his granddaughters, four times removed', claiming as justification the vestiges of the Bible-Belt morality he was raised under; it is only by two thousand years later that he is seen to have overcome that upbringing. His mother, who takes him to bed despite believing him to be her half-brother, claims that she 'fears the damage incest can do, both genetically and socially', but repeatedly shows that it is the genetic aspects that are her primary concern.
I would point out that he also wrote, in Time Enough for Love, in "The Tale of the Twins Who Weren't", how Lazarus Long, when he found himself in 'possession' of a pair of slaves, brother and sister, actively discouraged them from having sex, illustrating the reinforcement of recessives with a card game that he deliberately cheated at. It was only after he discovered that they were complementary twins and were thereby incapable of reinforcing any recessive genes that he stopped objecting to the two of them having sex.
I remember when I first heard about the offense referred to as DWB ('Driving While Black'); this is just a new and slightly modified form of the same 'not whitebread, therefore presumed to be suspicious' kneejerk...
My father retired from the Navy and went to work for one of the government contractors in the area; he wound up going through seven jobs in six years, because every time that a contract ended, the company would lay off all but the top three or four managers from the project, and he'd have to find another employer. After that, he decided to go back to work for the Navy as a civil servant (amusingly, winding up working about fifty yards from where I worked (having gotten hired as a civil servant for the Navy when I got out of college), and eventually retired from civil service. Working for a company that depends on government contracts for its operations is a chancy business until you've got enough experience that you're on the high end of the pile when the cuts go in when the contract ends.
Meanwhile, Abraxor has taken available data and projected that Firefox will overtake IE in August...
Done better, in my opinion, in Dork Tower:
Welcome to Rivendell...
...Mister Anderson.
You know the thing I hate about elves? It's the smell.
"Okay, so Hugo Weaving as Elrond sticks out a bit."
I feel saturated by it...
The question of 'brand name', though, is misleading when it comes to laptops, because there are only a few ODM (Original Design Manufacturers) who actually make laptops, selling them to companies that rebrand them under their own logo and sell them. For example, when I bought my laptop, the ODM design was the D900K, manufactured by Clevo (dual-core Athlon laptop). The actual laptop is branded ProStar; however, the D900K was also being sold by other brands, such as Sager and Alienware, who offered the D900K as the Aurora m7700 -- for a price, configured identically to the ProStar model I bought, that was $700 higher; all I would have gotten for that $700 was the Alienware name and a blue plastic Alienware-style case top. So comparisons against a 'brand name' PC laptop are not always indicative of anything except the price you pay for the brand name
Or, more accurately, "Look at this big hole; how could it have been made through the actions of known physical processes" as compared against "Look at this big hole; how could it have been made if we posit the existence of an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, nonmaterial entity? But, then, how do we prove the existence of this entity?"
Unfortunately for this concept, the fundamental principle of MMOs is "don't trust the client" -- as soon as you put game data on the client; it becomes hackable by the end users. For example, in NCSoft's City of Heroes, even though all the character data is stored on the server, world textures and sounds are stored on the client; fairly shortly after the introduction of exploration badges and history plaques to the game, there was a 'map patch' that would show, on your in-game map, the location of all the badges and plaques in each zone, so you could find them easier. Now, this doesn't affect the actual game mechanics, but think of the possibilities for hacking and duping that would exist if an MMO publisher let character data get off of its server onto a server controlled by a player and then accepted it back again. The rapidity with which unscrupulous players would have their characters off to custom hackservers to get outfitted with all the 'phat lewt' would make your head spin.
Many of the most hideous inefficiencies in modern businesses, particularly in technical industries, stem from the premise that modern management theory allows a properly-trained manager to manage any business process, regardless of whether or not they have any familiarity or understanding with that process. in 1942, George O. Smith's 'Venus Equilateral' story "QRM - Interplanetary" illustrated what an "efficiency expert" could do by coming in and upsetting practices that were worked out empirically as being the most efficient, but which look wasteful to someone without the knowledge to judge properly. And 'efficient management' becomes the province of business-administration graduates, because the people who are doing the technical jobs are doing it because it's what they want to do and don't want to be managers, which would take them away from what they want to be doing.