I'm no chemist, but I am a photographer. The light-sensitive chemical in photographic film and paper is a Silver Halide (usually silver chloride or silver bromide)
According to the wikipedia article, these chemicals are extremely insoluble in water.
Perhaps somebody more knowledgeable could jump in and explain the difference and the underlying chemistry?
I'm actually sort of surprised that gas turbines are still being used for naval propulsion, given that they've seem to have fallen out of favor everyplace else due to their exceptionally poor efficiency.
"Lights out at 10pm" makes no sense. We have far too much power at night, and far too little during the day.
Perhaps we could eventually see incentives from the government (or the energy companies) to encourage factories to perform their most energy-intensive operations at night.
That all said, there will be rioting in the streets before any sort of "lights out" rule is enacted. Many major cities have encouraged large buildings to install "kill switches" on their air-conditioning units to provide an alternative to rolling blackouts.
I don't even know how to dignify this with a response, apart from encouraging the moderators to mod it down as a troll, rather than 'Insightful'
Assuming that our government spontaneously decided to turn fascist, do you really think that they'd need a "smart grid" to cut power to undesirable cities and factories? They could just as easily physically sever the connection!
The "smart grid" is about repairing our power system, while anticipating future demands and generation methods. The current system has suffered from decades of neglect (as has much of our infrastructure), and is dangerously vulnerable in places. Three summers ago, about 170,000 residents of Queens in New York City lost power for several weeks after half of the feeder cables serving the borough burned up, while most of the other half eventually failed as well due to the grid's inability to properly compensate for the reduced supply. To help manage demand, many large buildings participate in a program that allows the utility company to cut power to Air Conditioning units if demand is too heavy.
In 2003, the entire northeast US (45 million people) lost power, due to a single (minor) fault in Ohio.
There's no grand conspiracy. Our current infrastructure is old, and needs to be fixed.
I'm not 100% current on the state of fusion research, although I do know that the Z-Machine has delivered extremely promising results that could eventually be used for commercial power generation
The barriers to actually using Z-pinch for fusion power actually do seem to be surmountable in a relatively short period -- ITER is unproven and appallingly expensive, while there are quite a few scientific questions that NIF will need to provide the answers to before we can even start thinking about commercializing laser-confined fusion.
On the other hand, we know that the Z-machine can produce the temperatures necessary to produce fusion, and more or less simply need a way to continuously feed it fuel, while harvesting the energy produced by the fusion reaction.
It's hardly 'unexpected' that hydroelectric dams cause huge lakes to form behind them, and for the flow of the river to slow down.
Hydroelectric power inevitably boils down to an economic decision. How much power are you willing to trade for a set (and actually quite predictable) environmental impact? In some cases, this is worth it, while perhaps not for others.
I wonder if I can get the bazillion dollar contract to rewrite their system... No, wait, my name isn't "Boeing" or "Lockheed" or Ken Murtha.
I was always amused by the fact that the tiny CRT screen at my post office that showed you how much your various postage options were going to cost had a tiny Lockheed Martin logo on the front.
I mean, seriously... how the hell did Lockheed somehow manage to outbid IBM, NCR, or any other manufacturer who makes things for people other than the US government on that contract? It's also not as if any of Lockheed's other products would happen to require a 4" monochrome CRT display that could possibly make economies of scale kick in...
That all said, the cash registers at the post office in my new town are made by IBM, which seems to be much more in line with the realm of sanity.
Also don't forget that the USPS now sells 1st class postage without a monetary value attached to it (ie. the stamp will work indefinitely regardless of rate increases).
If you want to hoard stamps, go right ahead. It'll actually work in the USPS's favor, as (like the parent mentioned) postage generally increases at a rate lower than inflation.
It was a pretty smart move on the USPS's part. Their public image is increased among individuals who lack a basic understanding of economics, I don't have to buy a book of 2-cent stamps every time they increase their rates, and the USPS doesn't have to bother printing books of 2-cent stamps, which can't possibly be worth much more than the paper they're printed on.
Yes, but do you have enough letters to be delivered from Kearny, NJ to Fresno, CA to fill that box? If not, how are you going to sort/redirect the individual letters that don't fit in conveniently-sized bins?
The USPS sorting infrastructure is just as (if not more) impressive than the actual shipping infrastructure.
Because NX on modern hardware can provide a user experience that is virtually indistinguishable from a local desktop.
Even X or VNC on a fast connection with fast machines on both ends will feel a bit sluggish. NX works great on old hardware with slow connections -- if you've got multiple clients, you can squeeze more clients out of the same hardware/bandwidth. This can be a *huge* deal.
NoMachine's products aren't cheap, but can be totally worth it given the cost savings in hardware, bandwidth, and support. Their free version also works great for anything but a terminal server.
Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, American Express, Capital One, BB&T, and US Bancorp have all paid back their TARP (bailout) funds, along with two dozen smaller banks.
Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo are actually not allowed to pay back their TARP funds until their own finances stabilize.
Ahh, reality with it's damned liberal bias again...
Indeed, I had wondered about that for a long time — how such smart people can be so dumb. But the cause finally occurred to me — professors are idealists. This allows them into the same comfortable reality-distortion field as Leftists. Personally, I am a Centrist, which IS the reality zone on the political spectrum.
But they're not. If anything, professors teaching subjects relevant to government (Economics, political science, government, and history) tend to be moderate-leaning conservatives. (Any current students or recent grads are free to chime in and confirm/deny this)
Us physicists and chemists could generally care less about politics, except for when a certain political party goes around decrying science in general. That tends to get on our nerves.
(It's not that we're particularly partisan either. Ask any physicist about Bill Clinton's cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider, and you'll likely hear a great deal of profanity.)
Really? I've been using FlashBlock on my older PPC macs, given that I rarely encounter a flash widget that *doesn't* cause CPU usage to spike to 100%.
I could understand the lack of HD support if VLC and QuickTime weren't able to handle 780p video without utilizing the entire CPU. VLC can play a youtube flash video, while keeping utilization at around 20% -- the real Flash Player almost always takes up 100%.
I understand that Flash's performance woes are by no means restricted to PPC Macs, although PCs of the same vintage have always seemed to perform considerably better while playing flash videos.
Develop for the lowest common denominator, and things will work on both platforms. Also consider that not all Silverlight users will be using 3.0 immediately after its release.
HTML5 will be released soon, but likely won't be implemented in the wild for another 3-4 years until most users are running supported browsers. CSS existed for several years before it was considered "safe" to use on a production site.
The Mac version of Silverlight only works on Intel Macs, where Flash works on both PPC and Intel.
"Works" is stretching things a little. PPC Flash was always painfully slow, even by Flash's usual miserable standards.
Google Chrome also won't support PPC users, and Apple is officially depreciating PowerPC support in its next OS release. Should we complain about that too?
I've still got a 12" Powerbook that I'll likely cling on to as long as it works -- it's easily the best laptop I've ever used. However, even I'll acknowledge that it's not practical for commercial software vendors to continually support old platforms.
I did some temp work in a (fairly well-off) district in Northern NJ 2 years ago.
Some of the teachers there wanted machines at their desks to check e-mails and perform other basic tasks with, and were given the OS9 iMacs that were formerly used in labs and classrooms. They fulfilled their (very simple) purpose quite well, and I believe are still in use.
I also still administer an old Xenix system that drives a series of B&W serial terminals and line printers via a DigiBoard. 'Administer' is a rather loose term, as it hasn't needed attention in about 3 years -- easily the most resilient and cost-effective system I've come across.
About 4 years ago I helped dismantle a lab of Apple ][es at a small college, where they were still being used to teach typing, and perform a few basic word processing tasks. The machines had been in use for over 20 years at the time of their retirement.
Every now and then, I'll run across a machine running DOS, Windows 3.1, or Windows 95. I haven't seen a Win98 machine since it fell from widespread use. Win2000 is also surprisingly scarce, considering how long NT4 lingered around. Haven't seen a Windows Me! machine since a few months before it was discontinued (and for good reason).
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I'm no chemist, but I am a photographer. The light-sensitive chemical in photographic film and paper is a Silver Halide (usually silver chloride or silver bromide)
According to the wikipedia article, these chemicals are extremely insoluble in water.
Perhaps somebody more knowledgeable could jump in and explain the difference and the underlying chemistry?
I'm actually sort of surprised that gas turbines are still being used for naval propulsion, given that they've seem to have fallen out of favor everyplace else due to their exceptionally poor efficiency.
"Lights out at 10pm" makes no sense. We have far too much power at night, and far too little during the day.
Perhaps we could eventually see incentives from the government (or the energy companies) to encourage factories to perform their most energy-intensive operations at night.
That all said, there will be rioting in the streets before any sort of "lights out" rule is enacted. Many major cities have encouraged large buildings to install "kill switches" on their air-conditioning units to provide an alternative to rolling blackouts.
I don't even know how to dignify this with a response, apart from encouraging the moderators to mod it down as a troll, rather than 'Insightful'
Assuming that our government spontaneously decided to turn fascist, do you really think that they'd need a "smart grid" to cut power to undesirable cities and factories? They could just as easily physically sever the connection!
The "smart grid" is about repairing our power system, while anticipating future demands and generation methods. The current system has suffered from decades of neglect (as has much of our infrastructure), and is dangerously vulnerable in places. Three summers ago, about 170,000 residents of Queens in New York City lost power for several weeks after half of the feeder cables serving the borough burned up, while most of the other half eventually failed as well due to the grid's inability to properly compensate for the reduced supply. To help manage demand, many large buildings participate in a program that allows the utility company to cut power to Air Conditioning units if demand is too heavy.
In 2003, the entire northeast US (45 million people) lost power, due to a single (minor) fault in Ohio.
There's no grand conspiracy. Our current infrastructure is old, and needs to be fixed.
I'm not 100% current on the state of fusion research, although I do know that the Z-Machine has delivered extremely promising results that could eventually be used for commercial power generation
The barriers to actually using Z-pinch for fusion power actually do seem to be surmountable in a relatively short period -- ITER is unproven and appallingly expensive, while there are quite a few scientific questions that NIF will need to provide the answers to before we can even start thinking about commercializing laser-confined fusion.
On the other hand, we know that the Z-machine can produce the temperatures necessary to produce fusion, and more or less simply need a way to continuously feed it fuel, while harvesting the energy produced by the fusion reaction.
Don't forget that the surface of a forest has a huge frictional coefficient, and sucks the power out of a gust of wind just as fast as a turbine.
It's hardly 'unexpected' that hydroelectric dams cause huge lakes to form behind them, and for the flow of the river to slow down.
Hydroelectric power inevitably boils down to an economic decision. How much power are you willing to trade for a set (and actually quite predictable) environmental impact? In some cases, this is worth it, while perhaps not for others.
There's an alternate explanation -- the USPS might sort its mail in such a way that doesn't require re-scanning at every hub.
I wonder if I can get the bazillion dollar contract to rewrite their system... No, wait, my name isn't "Boeing" or "Lockheed" or Ken Murtha.
I was always amused by the fact that the tiny CRT screen at my post office that showed you how much your various postage options were going to cost had a tiny Lockheed Martin logo on the front.
I mean, seriously... how the hell did Lockheed somehow manage to outbid IBM, NCR, or any other manufacturer who makes things for people other than the US government on that contract? It's also not as if any of Lockheed's other products would happen to require a 4" monochrome CRT display that could possibly make economies of scale kick in...
That all said, the cash registers at the post office in my new town are made by IBM, which seems to be much more in line with the realm of sanity.
(Bizarre contracts aside, the mail trucks used by the USPS built by Grumman and GM were designed exclusively for the USPS, and are expected to outlive their design lifespan by about 6 years. Definitely a cool bit of engineering.)
Also don't forget that the USPS now sells 1st class postage without a monetary value attached to it (ie. the stamp will work indefinitely regardless of rate increases).
If you want to hoard stamps, go right ahead. It'll actually work in the USPS's favor, as (like the parent mentioned) postage generally increases at a rate lower than inflation.
It was a pretty smart move on the USPS's part. Their public image is increased among individuals who lack a basic understanding of economics, I don't have to buy a book of 2-cent stamps every time they increase their rates, and the USPS doesn't have to bother printing books of 2-cent stamps, which can't possibly be worth much more than the paper they're printed on.
Yes, but do you have enough letters to be delivered from Kearny, NJ to Fresno, CA to fill that box? If not, how are you going to sort/redirect the individual letters that don't fit in conveniently-sized bins?
The USPS sorting infrastructure is just as (if not more) impressive than the actual shipping infrastructure.
Well, it does bring up the interesting question of why they're not doing it at the publicly-funded Smithsonian Air & Space museum across the street.
Not a good idea if you're in DC....
Because NX on modern hardware can provide a user experience that is virtually indistinguishable from a local desktop.
Even X or VNC on a fast connection with fast machines on both ends will feel a bit sluggish. NX works great on old hardware with slow connections -- if you've got multiple clients, you can squeeze more clients out of the same hardware/bandwidth. This can be a *huge* deal.
NoMachine's products aren't cheap, but can be totally worth it given the cost savings in hardware, bandwidth, and support. Their free version also works great for anything but a terminal server.
You can chalk me up as a *huge* fan of NX.
Start believing.
Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, American Express, Capital One, BB&T, and US Bancorp have all paid back their TARP (bailout) funds, along with two dozen smaller banks.
Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo are actually not allowed to pay back their TARP funds until their own finances stabilize.
Each B-2 bomber cost about $1 billion.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the aircraft was almost completely unnecessary, and yet we built more than twenty.
The SSC could easily have been built, and would have kept the US in the lead for basic science research for at least twenty years.
(And, yeah. The ISS should *never* have been built)
I'm waiting for MAME to be ported to an actual arcade cabinet. At that point we'll have come full-circle.
Dem politicos tend to favor more funding for the public employee unionized academic types at public colleges and universities.
Academica is unionized? Did I somehow miss that memo?
Indeed, I had wondered about that for a long time — how such smart people can be so dumb. But the cause finally occurred to me — professors are idealists. This allows them into the same comfortable reality-distortion field as Leftists. Personally, I am a Centrist, which IS the reality zone on the political spectrum.
But they're not. If anything, professors teaching subjects relevant to government (Economics, political science, government, and history) tend to be moderate-leaning conservatives. (Any current students or recent grads are free to chime in and confirm/deny this)
Us physicists and chemists could generally care less about politics, except for when a certain political party goes around decrying science in general. That tends to get on our nerves.
(It's not that we're particularly partisan either. Ask any physicist about Bill Clinton's cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider, and you'll likely hear a great deal of profanity.)
Really? I've been using FlashBlock on my older PPC macs, given that I rarely encounter a flash widget that *doesn't* cause CPU usage to spike to 100%.
I could understand the lack of HD support if VLC and QuickTime weren't able to handle 780p video without utilizing the entire CPU. VLC can play a youtube flash video, while keeping utilization at around 20% -- the real Flash Player almost always takes up 100%.
I understand that Flash's performance woes are by no means restricted to PPC Macs, although PCs of the same vintage have always seemed to perform considerably better while playing flash videos.
Netflix's Silverlight player has always worked just fine for me.
Fine.
Develop for the lowest common denominator, and things will work on both platforms. Also consider that not all Silverlight users will be using 3.0 immediately after its release.
HTML5 will be released soon, but likely won't be implemented in the wild for another 3-4 years until most users are running supported browsers. CSS existed for several years before it was considered "safe" to use on a production site.
The Mac version of Silverlight only works on Intel Macs, where Flash works on both PPC and Intel.
"Works" is stretching things a little. PPC Flash was always painfully slow, even by Flash's usual miserable standards.
Google Chrome also won't support PPC users, and Apple is officially depreciating PowerPC support in its next OS release. Should we complain about that too?
I've still got a 12" Powerbook that I'll likely cling on to as long as it works -- it's easily the best laptop I've ever used. However, even I'll acknowledge that it's not practical for commercial software vendors to continually support old platforms.
I did some temp work in a (fairly well-off) district in Northern NJ 2 years ago.
Some of the teachers there wanted machines at their desks to check e-mails and perform other basic tasks with, and were given the OS9 iMacs that were formerly used in labs and classrooms. They fulfilled their (very simple) purpose quite well, and I believe are still in use.
I also still administer an old Xenix system that drives a series of B&W serial terminals and line printers via a DigiBoard. 'Administer' is a rather loose term, as it hasn't needed attention in about 3 years -- easily the most resilient and cost-effective system I've come across.
About 4 years ago I helped dismantle a lab of Apple ][es at a small college, where they were still being used to teach typing, and perform a few basic word processing tasks. The machines had been in use for over 20 years at the time of their retirement.
Every now and then, I'll run across a machine running DOS, Windows 3.1, or Windows 95. I haven't seen a Win98 machine since it fell from widespread use. Win2000 is also surprisingly scarce, considering how long NT4 lingered around. Haven't seen a Windows Me! machine since a few months before it was discontinued (and for good reason).
Arg. Slashdot didn't parse my link. Here's the test I meant to refer to.