And if Hawkings' parents had known they were carrying the genes for ALS, they might well have decided not to have children in the first place. This depends on what the odds actually are, though. ALS is probably not a single-gene defect, or it would have been found already, and if I was told that I and my wife had all 10 genes needed for something like ALS but the chances of them coming together in one child was 1 in 1024, I think we'd risk it, because there's a far higher chance of something else going wrong anyhow... And I'm sure that whatever genetics and environmental combination gave Hawkins his genius is far more more improbable than that.
But in this particular case, there was definitely a 50-50 chance of the child losing his or her mind before 40. It would be cruel and irresponsible to have a child unless better odds were possible.
As for adoption, there aren't that many healthy, normal babies out there, and I'd think that the fact that the mother was not going to become unable to care for the child long before it was an adult would be a pretty good reason not to give one of them to this family.
A very long time ago, Robert A Heinlein wrote a book, Beyond this Horizon, where superior babies were produced by screening the entire parental genomes to pick out the best combinations. It's like this, on a much larger scale. No genetic modifications, no splicing in foreign genes, just picking out the best eggs and sperm. That's a whole lot less likely to cause unintended consequences than tossing in new genes, and if the genome was well enough understood, it should be good enough to nearly eliminate double-digit IQ's, chronically ill, and the genetically criminal within a couple of generations.
There were "control naturals", people whose ancestors had never used this genetic filtering. They received a governmental stipend to compensate for their disadvantage. Heinlein never really discussed _why_ they existed, perhaps he thought it was too obvious. Sometimes those genes you would normally filter out might turn out to be strongly advantageous in different circumstances -- heterozygotes for sickle cell anemia are virtually immune to malaria, for instance.
Finally, note that this book is the most utopian of all Heinlein's work, and the most boring. A perfect society is one where "interesting" things don't happen to people, so getting a story out of an almost perfect society is difficult... 8-)
Doesn't the unemployment office require documentation of your quest for work? I know the last time I was drawing unemployment (12 years ago, in Michigan), I had to turn in a form every week listing at least 3 "contacts". E.g., go to that small business in Cadillac that's in my field and looks like a great place to work, and confirm that they're still firing, not hiring. Hit two other places in the same industrial park at random. Fill in the form. That's done, it's 10 am Monday, and I've got the rest of the week for _real_ job hunting...
If the Market can't do it, and the Government can't do it, then who? Damned if I know. But don't keep on doing what has already been proven not to work... If you can think of how to structure this "deposit" idea so as not to turn into a gigantic boondoggle, raising the price by several times as much as proper recycling actually costs and quite likely not getting the recycling done, please tell the rest of us.
Just one thing has been shown to lead to actual environmental improvements: prosperity. And the best way to achieve prosperity seems to be to reduce regulation. This is very, very clear in the negative: starving people will do whatever they have to do to get food now, and hope to deal with the consequences later. The worst pollution occurs in China, Russia, and other impoverished and over-governed countries.
Several people cited bottle deposits as an analogy to the recycling tax proposal. Bottle deposits do work to reduce roadside litter, but it's a very inefficient system. You pay 7-1/2 or 12-1/2 cents per can, and get back 5 or 10 cents when you turn them in, and the process of turning them in is rather time-consuming due to the necessity of verifying the deposit stamps. After turn-in, I don't know how many of the plastic bottles collected are actually being recycled. Aluminum recycling is economically viable on it's own (that is, melting down a truckload of scrap metal is so much cheaper than electrolyzing ore that scrap alumminum has a positive value per pound), so even without the deposit, put enough cans out in one place and someone would take them to sell as scrap. The most definite social benefit of bottle deposits is that it gives people on the bottom of the social pyramid one way of getting a little cash without being employable or filling out paperwork. I do accept bottle deposits because they work both to reduce litter and to transfer a little income from the rich and careless to the desperately poor, but nobody _has_ to drink soda pop, and if the deposit causes you to cut back your consumption, it's better for your health anyhow. OTOH, taxing computers enough to cover recycling costs plus several times as much for bureaucracy would be a significant drag on the economy, and dragging down the economy _does_ hurt the environment.
By the way, since someone mentioned pig farming: most successful farm operations (in the US, at least) aren't making their profits from selling the products of agriculture, but by collecting government subsidies. Or else they are investing in land and farming it to pay the taxes while waiting for the price to go up. It's the individual family farms that are actually trying to run at a profit, and I don't know many that succeed.
In the long run, commodity producers do wind up selling at just above production cost (including finance costs for the capital equipment). If the profit margins go up, either the present producers expand their production, or other companies jump in, and this drives prices down. When prices go too low or expenses too high, the least efficient producer goes out of the business (bankrupt or simply moving to a less competitive field).
Exceptions to this are where a monopoly, patent, or regulation controls the market, or where resources are limited. Most of those situations are limited in time -- e.g., patents expire, monopolists irritate their customers into actively seeking alternatives, and the gold market can skyrocket when the demand increases, but if the price stays high for long enough, someone is going to notice that gold-bearing rock that was previously buried too deep or too small a gold percentage to be worth mining has now become profitable. Or if an expanding market is crimped by lack of production equipment, prices and profit margins will rise for a time, but more equipment will be ordered and eventually delivered. (Given a long lead-time for expanded production and sufficient shortsightedness on the part of market participants, this can lead instead to a lasting cycle of shortage, high prices, expanded production, glut, bankruptcies, shortage; on the average, the price is just enough to keep efficient producers profitable, but it can oscillate around that point a lot. The oil market is a perfect example -- but note that governments have always had a heavy hand in this market, and governments don't learn from experience...)
Of course there are many markets where the sales price is unrelated to the production costs -- like $25 tennis shoes selling for $150 because they have the Nike logo. But too many computer buyers are aware that all PC's are fundamentally the same, so hype has never been able to support an overpriced line for long. Apple's Macintosh patents and copyrights (a legally enforced monopoly) have enabled them to sell at a higher price, but into a tiny market that can barely support the engineering effort of maintaining a genuinely different product line.
PC production involves no monopolies (except Microsoft's OS, and that's survived only because so far they've been smart enough not to abuse it to the serious detriment of the manufacturers), and no resource shortages that can't be solved by spending more money for a few months. So profit margins stay low. You take $20 more out in taxes, either they raise the price or they cut back on what goes in the box, because they aren't going to be able to cut back on their net for long and survive.
All of the above applies to production -- sales and distribution is a whole different scenario, where markups are often ridiculously high, and hyped-up advertising seems to be necessary to get customers into the stores. Groceries are an exception -- but everyone needs to eat, while most people don't _need_ a new computer, a 2nd VCR, or a 6th pair of shoes...
However, since reading at -1 involves skipping past hundreds of "first posts" and feeble attempts at porn, it gets pretty hard to do./. would be "freer" if there was a multidimensional rating system -- e.g., I can have scores recalculated using weighting factors I assign to the moderators. (There are ways to do this automatically -- that is, you give feedback on the posts as you read them, and moderator weights are bumped up and down depending on agreement or disagreement. This is a simplified form of neural net learniing.)
I'm not serious about this for/. -- it's too much complication for what the results would be worth. But in real life, you do have to select what's worth looking into further by using various other people's opinions. Not necessarily positive opinions! If I heard that both Jesse Jackson and Pat Buchanan hated something, I'd certainly have to check it out...;-)
1) I do not recall the article saying much about "add the cost of recycling to the cost of the product", but rather it seemed to assume that you could tax the cost of recycling out of the manufacturer without costing the consumer... And if you've ever dealt with the gov't at all, you should be aware that getting it involved multiplies the costs by several times.
2) To repeat what I've posted elsewhere: these bills probably will NOT ensure the stuff gets properly recycled. Rather, politically connected "recycling" companies will take fat fees, and ship the stuff to China... This has been how environmental laws have generally worked out -- it creates a class of parasite "environmental compliance" companies that don't actually do much to help the environment, but do make lots of money filling out the paperwork to prove compliance with the regulations. Quite often the only actual "abatement" has been to make the smokestacks taller, so instead of Chicago (for instance) having polluted air at ground level, it drifts into Michigan.
3) Another effect of environmental legislation has been to insulate the polluters from private lawsuits. Sure your skin will dissolve if you step into the river, but we've got 20 tons of properly filled in forms showing that our emissions are in compliance with the law...
I would like to see some real transfer of environmental costs back to the producers and users -- but under the patterns so far followed in the US, it just doesn't happen.
No, it's called economics. What I was commenting about is the leftist/environmentalist idiocy of the article, which implied that it's possible to take money out of the manufacturers without having the cost passed on to consumers. It won't happen -- if they cannot raise the price to compensate for taxes and other increased costs, they'll just stop making the product, or reduce the quality...
We need something other than dumping our machines in Asia for "recycling" there.
Maybe so, but what these bills will do is require the mfgs to take back their used equipment and pay "recycling" fees to some politically-favored company to dump the stuff in Asia...
Environmental groups take a harsher view, saying that the high-tech industry hasn't done nearly enough and foists costs onto consumers that should be picked up by the manufacturers themselves. Consumers ultimately get the tab for manufacturers' costs...
To be precise, it's a relationship between _wavelength_ and directionality. Waves diffract around the edges of the antenna, parabolic reflector, or lens, and so you cannot form a tight beam unless the aperture is much larger than a wavelength.
wavelength * distance = k * aperture * resolution
or
resolution = wavelength*distance/(k*aperture)
"Aperture" is the effective diameter of the antenna/parabolic reflector/primary lens.
"Resolution" here means the diameter of the best focused spot if transmitting, or the closest together point sources a receiver (radar, telescope, directional mike) can resolve. This is a somewhat fuzzy definition, since the power density of the transmitted beam tapers off from the center...
"k" is a constant, depending on how you define resolution (e.g., do you need a head-sized spot at full power and don't care about whether audible sound bleeds over several feet away, or do you need to ensure that no one else can hear it at all). Under various definitions, "k" can be 1/3 to 3.
So for sound at 100 Hz (bass, but not a really deep bass):
So a 10 foot speaker can focus the output into a spot 100 foot wide at 100 feet. If you filter the bass, at 1KHz, which is center of the voice band, you get a 10 foot spot at 100 foot -- from a ridiculously large speaker. To focus down to where just one person hears the sound, you'd need a 10 foot speaker only 10 feet away -- you might as well put a smaller speaker around his head.
Ultrasound improves these numbers because the wavelength is smaller. At 60 KHz, wavelength is 1/60th of a foot, so a 1 foot speaker could send just to one person up to about 60 foot. Of course, you are depending on non-linear interactions in his skull to "rectify" the high frequency carrier and extract the audible band signal.
Note that you can synthesize an enormous aperture from an array of small elements, if you can keep them precisely positioned and synchronized. So by covering the entire ceiling of the Senate chamber with little speakers, you could make _only_ Jesse Helms hear voices (if he's got any hearing left). This seems rather excessive. With the ultrasound scheme, maybe you could hide the rig in a briefcase and literally put the voices in his head from the gallery. Much more fun that way, eh?
Oh darn, yet another thing for their security to check for...
When I worked in defense contracting, there were about 2 guys doing paperwork and QA for every guy working. And this was a company ran by veterans and retirees who were _not_ going to screw the service, do a half-assed job, or run the costs up any higher than necessary to do the job right and according to regulations. It was the regulations that ran the costs up, mainly the regulations Congress enacted to make sure no one was screwing the service...
I live in northern Michigan, and snowmobile accidents kill nearly as many people as car accidents around here. Much of the time you can't _see_ much from a snowmobile, because snow is blowing around, and you are riding right down in it. If snowmobilers running a clearly marked roadside or trail can run smack into a parked car or tree -- and they frequently do, sometimes at 70mph -- it could be pretty easy to get lost in more open country. Sounds like this guy got lost and wound up going down a river on thin ice. .
For the rest, snowmobilers dress very warmly, because they are going to be enduring extreme wind-chill for hours while not moving enough to generate much body heat. Not sure about Wyoming, but I'd have no worries about surviving a night here in a _dry_ snowmobile suit and boots. I'd dig into a snowbank at night, of course, but the suit itself is warm enough until you do something stupid. In daylight, I'd hike out, making sure to open the suit up enough that I didn't sweat in it. But I know how to navigate in the woods at any season, if you don't and people are going to be looking for you, it's a better idea to make some sort of highly visible markings, then stay put.
Trouble is, this guy got his boots full of icy water, and soaked the suit to where it wasn't much of an insulator. And maybe he had survival gear -- on the river bottom with the snowmobile...
I doubt that a battery-operated jacket would be working after a dunking, and if it was working, that it would provide enough heat before the batteries went out. It would be much better to stuff some waterproof matches and maybe some sort of fuel in your pockets.
Yeah, sounds great. After all, for trespass the penalty was probably only a few hours in the stocks (less comfy than it sounds, since the villagers got to throw stuff). But burning whoever invented pop-ups at the stake sounds just about right...
Keelhauling was only used for certain ship-board offenses, so as good as it sounds for spammers, it wouldn't apply to trespass. In the laws of the _land_ in 1610, punishments ranged from the stocks to excessively painful forms of execution like drawing and quartering. For trespass, probably the stocks: that is, the miscreant is locked into a wooden frame out in the village square, and the victims and other villagers get to throw rotten veggies, etc., at him for a designated time, but the guard is supposed to prevent any throwing of large rocks or other things that might actually kill him.
How would we update that to the internet age? Would the spammer's victims be allowed to hire "designated throwers" by e-mail? 8-)
This does sound like how the Japanese army in WWII was fed -- or at least how British commanders claimed they must have been fed, after their commands were overrun by Japanese troops that just popped out of the jungle, with none of the vast supply train required by western forces. However, I very much doubt that this was their entire food supply -- a complaint that applies to virtually all armies in the field is that little livestock remains after they have passed, and the Imperial Japanese Army is alleged to have taken that to extremes.
Aside from needing meat and other supplements, the problem with rice for troops in the field is that cooking rice does take time, water, and fire -- there are many times it can't be done. The IJA probably just trained the troops to tough it out when food couldn't be prepared -- or to snatch a chicken and eat it raw. This is not such great policy in the long run, you lose troops to medical problems.
Remember, Wellington got the cooks up in the middle of the night before Waterloo to ensure that his troops started the day with a full hot meal -- and always claimed that this was the margin of victory, it gave the troops the strength to hang on a couple of extra hours until Blucher finally arrived. Considering the conditions for shipping and cooking food in the field in 1813 (or was it 1814?), these meals were probably a lot worse than MRE's. (And I've eaten MRE's at their worst.) But they were nutritionally complete meals, which rice isn't...
The absolute worst scheme for provisioning an army, ever, was probably Sparta's. Boys started military training at something like 6. They were never fed. They had to steal food, with severe beatings if they got caught. Spartan commanders didn't have to worry about supplies, but I suspect that Sparta's allies would have been very reluctant to have Spartan armies cross their territories...
Yep. During my nine years in the Air Force (1978-87) and three years trotting around Army bases as a contractor, MRE's were the second worst "meal" I ever encountered. Basically, these were plastic bags of mystery goo, which had been reheated in a pot of boiling water.
The worst food: Air Force mess hall food, trucked out to a firing range 30 miles of bouncy gravel road away. Apparently there was a steam table or something in the truck to keep it hot, but after being kept hot for over an hour, we weren't sure whether the green goo had once been peas or green beans...
OTOH, the old C-rations (Korean War surplus, I think) weren't bad, if you didn't have to eat them too often. These were little boxes of canned foods ("tins" if you're British). Even the cake for desert was canned, and pretty good, at least compared to the freshly and badly cooked stuff at the mess hall... The selection was rather limited, and in particular, there aren't very many ways canned meat can come out (spam, spam, spam, spam,...), so I do have sympathy for those WWII soldiers that got C-rats or worse (K-rats, like a candy bar designed by a sadistic drill sergeant) for months at a time. But overall, I'd rather eat cold C-rats than warm MRE's, unless they've considerably improved the process since then.
San Mateo has enough resources available to feed its population.
No, it has the money to buy food and water from other sparsely populated areas in the US. Just disrupt civilization, motorized transportation, or the belief that pieces of green paper are actually worth something, and any American city would be in worse shape than Bangladesh... On the average, the US is fairly lightly populated, but that's averaging farmlands with one family per square mile, deserts and mountains with almost no permanent human residents, and densely populated urban areas together..
Trouble is, hardness does not equal impact resistance. Glass is very hard and pretty strong, until a crack starts -- then it runs clear through the material. Aluminum oxide is harder, but I think it's also brittle.
I can't really tell from the extremely bad translations, but it sounds like maybe this is a process analogous to tempering glass -- that is, heat treating it to create internal stresses that limit crack propagation. Probably very expensive. If it would make an unbreakable beer mug at a reasonable price, they'd already have tempered glass unbreakable mugs...
Correct. DOS is good for doing ONE thing at a time -- it loads the program and stays out of the way. A real time OS allows many programs and threads to run at the same time, while guaranteeing that the threads designated as high priority get to run within a certain time. Windows and most unixes multi-task, but don't guarantee that the motor-control thread will get executed again before the thing has run off the end of the track...
I've written a number of data conversion utilities. Often it takes less than 100 lines, and qbasic was pretty good for these little projects because there is no overhead to starting the program, and because basic has always had pretty good string handling. If it looked necessary to process the input byte by byte, or if a lot of data was going to be cranked through it, I'd use c because it runs faster, but often qbasic did the job in about the size of a c "hello world" program.
Example: a circuit board assembly plant gets component X-Y locations in many different file formats from many different customers' CAD systems, and had to be converted to the format used by our placement machines. All these were text files in columnar format, but the X,Y coordinates might be in 1/1000 inches or millimeters, X, Y, and part columns could be in different orders, other information might or might not be included, columns could be separated by tabs or by spaces, if space separated the column locations could differ. Nowadays, the machines come with pretty good import utilities, but that wasn't always true. So, I used to write conversion programs. 1st generation was a different qbasic program for every format received; it would read a line, pick out the x, y, and part strings by position using MID$, or by searching for tabs, convert millimeters to mils if needed, then write it out in the machine format. For the second generation, we had a Visual Basic import one of my programs and dress it up with a form where the user identified the x, y, and part columns, so one program handled all formats.
If I have to do something like this now, I use Excel -- it has a pretty good text file import routine -- and then manually rearrange the columns for the output... But in the 1980's, qbasic was a pretty good tool for small jobs. And it was easy to move from that to QuickBasic (a compiler you bought separately), which could do big projects. I wouldn't recommend it for compilers, an OS, or any 100-man project, but for something that took 1 coder a month to a year, QuickBasic was pretty good.
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And if Hawkings' parents had known they were carrying the genes for ALS, they might well have decided not to have children in the first place. This depends on what the odds actually are, though. ALS is probably not a single-gene defect, or it would have been found already, and if I was told that I and my wife had all 10 genes needed for something like ALS but the chances of them coming together in one child was 1 in 1024, I think we'd risk it, because there's a far higher chance of something else going wrong anyhow... And I'm sure that whatever genetics and environmental combination gave Hawkins his genius is far more more improbable than that.
But in this particular case, there was definitely a 50-50 chance of the child losing his or her mind before 40. It would be cruel and irresponsible to have a child unless better odds were possible.
As for adoption, there aren't that many healthy, normal babies out there, and I'd think that the fact that the mother was not going to become unable to care for the child long before it was an adult would be a pretty good reason not to give one of them to this family.
A very long time ago, Robert A Heinlein wrote a book, Beyond this Horizon, where superior babies were produced by screening the entire parental genomes to pick out the best combinations. It's like this, on a much larger scale. No genetic modifications, no splicing in foreign genes, just picking out the best eggs and sperm. That's a whole lot less likely to cause unintended consequences than tossing in new genes, and if the genome was well enough understood, it should be good enough to nearly eliminate double-digit IQ's, chronically ill, and the genetically criminal within a couple of generations.
There were "control naturals", people whose ancestors had never used this genetic filtering. They received a governmental stipend to compensate for their disadvantage. Heinlein never really discussed _why_ they existed, perhaps he thought it was too obvious. Sometimes those genes you would normally filter out might turn out to be strongly advantageous in different circumstances -- heterozygotes for sickle cell anemia are virtually immune to malaria, for instance.
Finally, note that this book is the most utopian of all Heinlein's work, and the most boring. A perfect society is one where "interesting" things don't happen to people, so getting a story out of an almost perfect society is difficult... 8-)
Doesn't the unemployment office require documentation of your quest for work? I know the last time I was drawing unemployment (12 years ago, in Michigan), I had to turn in a form every week listing at least 3 "contacts". E.g., go to that small business in Cadillac that's in my field and looks like a great place to work, and confirm that they're still firing, not hiring. Hit two other places in the same industrial park at random. Fill in the form. That's done, it's 10 am Monday, and I've got the rest of the week for _real_ job hunting...
If the Market can't do it, and the Government can't do it, then who? Damned if I know. But don't keep on doing what has already been proven not to work... If you can think of how to structure this "deposit" idea so as not to turn into a gigantic boondoggle, raising the price by several times as much as proper recycling actually costs and quite likely not getting the recycling done, please tell the rest of us.
Just one thing has been shown to lead to actual environmental improvements: prosperity. And the best way to achieve prosperity seems to be to reduce regulation. This is very, very clear in the negative: starving people will do whatever they have to do to get food now, and hope to deal with the consequences later. The worst pollution occurs in China, Russia, and other impoverished and over-governed countries.
Several people cited bottle deposits as an analogy to the recycling tax proposal. Bottle deposits do work to reduce roadside litter, but it's a very inefficient system. You pay 7-1/2 or 12-1/2 cents per can, and get back 5 or 10 cents when you turn them in, and the process of turning them in is rather time-consuming due to the necessity of verifying the deposit stamps. After turn-in, I don't know how many of the plastic bottles collected are actually being recycled. Aluminum recycling is economically viable on it's own (that is, melting down a truckload of scrap metal is so much cheaper than electrolyzing ore that scrap alumminum has a positive value per pound), so even without the deposit, put enough cans out in one place and someone would take them to sell as scrap. The most definite social benefit of bottle deposits is that it gives people on the bottom of the social pyramid one way of getting a little cash without being employable or filling out paperwork. I do accept bottle deposits because they work both to reduce litter and to transfer a little income from the rich and careless to the desperately poor, but nobody _has_ to drink soda pop, and if the deposit causes you to cut back your consumption, it's better for your health anyhow. OTOH, taxing computers enough to cover recycling costs plus several times as much for bureaucracy would be a significant drag on the economy, and dragging down the economy _does_ hurt the environment.
By the way, since someone mentioned pig farming: most successful farm operations (in the US, at least) aren't making their profits from selling the products of agriculture, but by collecting government subsidies. Or else they are investing in land and farming it to pay the taxes while waiting for the price to go up. It's the individual family farms that are actually trying to run at a profit, and I don't know many that succeed.
In the long run, commodity producers do wind up selling at just above production cost (including finance costs for the capital equipment). If the profit margins go up, either the present producers expand their production, or other companies jump in, and this drives prices down. When prices go too low or expenses too high, the least efficient producer goes out of the business (bankrupt or simply moving to a less competitive field).
Exceptions to this are where a monopoly, patent, or regulation controls the market, or where resources are limited. Most of those situations are limited in time -- e.g., patents expire, monopolists irritate their customers into actively seeking alternatives, and the gold market can skyrocket when the demand increases, but if the price stays high for long enough, someone is going to notice that gold-bearing rock that was previously buried too deep or too small a gold percentage to be worth mining has now become profitable. Or if an expanding market is crimped by lack of production equipment, prices and profit margins will rise for a time, but more equipment will be ordered and eventually delivered. (Given a long lead-time for expanded production and sufficient shortsightedness on the part of market participants, this can lead instead to a lasting cycle of shortage, high prices, expanded production, glut, bankruptcies, shortage; on the average, the price is just enough to keep efficient producers profitable, but it can oscillate around that point a lot. The oil market is a perfect example -- but note that governments have always had a heavy hand in this market, and governments don't learn from experience...)
Of course there are many markets where the sales price is unrelated to the production costs -- like $25 tennis shoes selling for $150 because they have the Nike logo. But too many computer buyers are aware that all PC's are fundamentally the same, so hype has never been able to support an overpriced line for long. Apple's Macintosh patents and copyrights (a legally enforced monopoly) have enabled them to sell at a higher price, but into a tiny market that can barely support the engineering effort of maintaining a genuinely different product line.
PC production involves no monopolies (except Microsoft's OS, and that's survived only because so far they've been smart enough not to abuse it to the serious detriment of the manufacturers), and no resource shortages that can't be solved by spending more money for a few months. So profit margins stay low. You take $20 more out in taxes, either they raise the price or they cut back on what goes in the box, because they aren't going to be able to cut back on their net for long and survive.
All of the above applies to production -- sales and distribution is a whole different scenario, where markups are often ridiculously high, and hyped-up advertising seems to be necessary to get customers into the stores. Groceries are an exception -- but everyone needs to eat, while most people don't _need_ a new computer, a 2nd VCR, or a 6th pair of shoes...
This was satire, right?
However, since reading at -1 involves skipping past hundreds of "first posts" and feeble attempts at porn, it gets pretty hard to do. /. would be "freer" if there was a multidimensional rating system -- e.g., I can have scores recalculated using weighting factors I assign to the moderators. (There are ways to do this automatically -- that is, you give feedback on the posts as you read them, and moderator weights are bumped up and down depending on agreement or disagreement. This is a simplified form of neural net learniing.)
/. -- it's too much complication for what the results would be worth. But in real life, you do have to select what's worth looking into further by using various other people's opinions. Not necessarily positive opinions! If I heard that both Jesse Jackson and Pat Buchanan hated something, I'd certainly have to check it out... ;-)
I'm not serious about this for
1) I do not recall the article saying much about "add the cost of recycling to the cost of the product", but rather it seemed to assume that you could tax the cost of recycling out of the manufacturer without costing the consumer... And if you've ever dealt with the gov't at all, you should be aware that getting it involved multiplies the costs by several times.
2) To repeat what I've posted elsewhere: these bills probably will NOT ensure the stuff gets properly recycled. Rather, politically connected "recycling" companies will take fat fees, and ship the stuff to China... This has been how environmental laws have generally worked out -- it creates a class of parasite "environmental compliance" companies that don't actually do much to help the environment, but do make lots of money filling out the paperwork to prove compliance with the regulations. Quite often the only actual "abatement" has been to make the smokestacks taller, so instead of Chicago (for instance) having polluted air at ground level, it drifts into Michigan.
3) Another effect of environmental legislation has been to insulate the polluters from private lawsuits. Sure your skin will dissolve if you step into the river, but we've got 20 tons of properly filled in forms showing that our emissions are in compliance with the law...
I would like to see some real transfer of environmental costs back to the producers and users -- but under the patterns so far followed in the US, it just doesn't happen.
No, it's called economics. What I was commenting about is the leftist/environmentalist idiocy of the article, which implied that it's possible to take money out of the manufacturers without having the cost passed on to consumers. It won't happen -- if they cannot raise the price to compensate for taxes and other increased costs, they'll just stop making the product, or reduce the quality...
No, it's to ensure that politically connected "recycling" companies can make big profits by shipping them to China.
We need something other than dumping our machines in Asia for "recycling" there.
Maybe so, but what these bills will do is require the mfgs to take back their used equipment and pay "recycling" fees to some politically-favored company to dump the stuff in Asia...
Environmental groups take a harsher view, saying that the high-tech industry hasn't done nearly enough and foists costs onto consumers that should be picked up by the manufacturers themselves. Consumers ultimately get the tab for manufacturers' costs...
To be precise, it's a relationship between _wavelength_ and directionality. Waves diffract around the edges of the antenna, parabolic reflector, or lens, and so you cannot form a tight beam unless the aperture is much larger than a wavelength.
wavelength * distance = k * aperture * resolution
or
resolution = wavelength*distance/(k*aperture)
"Aperture" is the effective diameter of the antenna/parabolic reflector/primary lens.
"Resolution" here means the diameter of the best focused spot if transmitting, or the closest together point sources a receiver (radar, telescope, directional mike) can resolve. This is a somewhat fuzzy definition, since the power density of the transmitted beam tapers off from the center...
"k" is a constant, depending on how you define resolution (e.g., do you need a head-sized spot at full power and don't care about whether audible sound bleeds over several feet away, or do you need to ensure that no one else can hear it at all). Under various definitions, "k" can be 1/3 to 3.
So for sound at 100 Hz (bass, but not a really deep bass):
wavelength = speed/frequency ~= 700mph/100hz = (1027 ft/sec)/(100/sec) ~= 10 feet
So a 10 foot speaker can focus the output into a spot 100 foot wide at 100 feet. If you filter the bass, at 1KHz, which is center of the voice band, you get a 10 foot spot at 100 foot -- from a ridiculously large speaker. To focus down to where just one person hears the sound, you'd need a 10 foot speaker only 10 feet away -- you might as well put a smaller speaker around his head.
Ultrasound improves these numbers because the wavelength is smaller. At 60 KHz, wavelength is 1/60th of a foot, so a 1 foot speaker could send just to one person up to about 60 foot. Of course, you are depending on non-linear interactions in his skull to "rectify" the high frequency carrier and extract the audible band signal.
Note that you can synthesize an enormous aperture from an array of small elements, if you can keep them precisely positioned and synchronized. So by covering the entire ceiling of the Senate chamber with little speakers, you could make _only_ Jesse Helms hear voices (if he's got any hearing left). This seems rather excessive. With the ultrasound scheme, maybe you could hide the rig in a briefcase and literally put the voices in his head from the gallery. Much more fun that way, eh?
Oh darn, yet another thing for their security to check for...
I'm glad to see this site go up
Well, it apparently was up before we slashdotted it...
When I worked in defense contracting, there were about 2 guys doing paperwork and QA for every guy working. And this was a company ran by veterans and retirees who were _not_ going to screw the service, do a half-assed job, or run the costs up any higher than necessary to do the job right and according to regulations. It was the regulations that ran the costs up, mainly the regulations Congress enacted to make sure no one was screwing the service...
I live in northern Michigan, and snowmobile accidents kill nearly as many people as car accidents around here. Much of the time you can't _see_ much from a snowmobile, because snow is blowing around, and you are riding right down in it. If snowmobilers running a clearly marked roadside or trail can run smack into a parked car or tree -- and they frequently do, sometimes at 70mph -- it could be pretty easy to get lost in more open country. Sounds like this guy got lost and wound up going down a river on thin ice. .
For the rest, snowmobilers dress very warmly, because they are going to be enduring extreme wind-chill for hours while not moving enough to generate much body heat. Not sure about Wyoming, but I'd have no worries about surviving a night here in a _dry_ snowmobile suit and boots. I'd dig into a snowbank at night, of course, but the suit itself is warm enough until you do something stupid. In daylight, I'd hike out, making sure to open the suit up enough that I didn't sweat in it. But I know how to navigate in the woods at any season, if you don't and people are going to be looking for you, it's a better idea to make some sort of highly visible markings, then stay put.
Trouble is, this guy got his boots full of icy water, and soaked the suit to where it wasn't much of an insulator. And maybe he had survival gear -- on the river bottom with the snowmobile...
I doubt that a battery-operated jacket would be working after a dunking, and if it was working, that it would provide enough heat before the batteries went out. It would be much better to stuff some waterproof matches and maybe some sort of fuel in your pockets.
Yeah, sounds great. After all, for trespass the penalty was probably only a few hours in the stocks (less comfy than it sounds, since the villagers got to throw stuff). But burning whoever invented pop-ups at the stake sounds just about right...
Keelhauling was only used for certain ship-board offenses, so as good as it sounds for spammers, it wouldn't apply to trespass. In the laws of the _land_ in 1610, punishments ranged from the stocks to excessively painful forms of execution like drawing and quartering. For trespass, probably the stocks: that is, the miscreant is locked into a wooden frame out in the village square, and the victims and other villagers get to throw rotten veggies, etc., at him for a designated time, but the guard is supposed to prevent any throwing of large rocks or other things that might actually kill him.
How would we update that to the internet age? Would the spammer's victims be allowed to hire "designated throwers" by e-mail? 8-)
Or maybe you get to sell a lazy or incompetent system administrator as a slave...
This does sound like how the Japanese army in WWII was fed -- or at least how British commanders claimed they must have been fed, after their commands were overrun by Japanese troops that just popped out of the jungle, with none of the vast supply train required by western forces. However, I very much doubt that this was their entire food supply -- a complaint that applies to virtually all armies in the field is that little livestock remains after they have passed, and the Imperial Japanese Army is alleged to have taken that to extremes.
Aside from needing meat and other supplements, the problem with rice for troops in the field is that cooking rice does take time, water, and fire -- there are many times it can't be done. The IJA probably just trained the troops to tough it out when food couldn't be prepared -- or to snatch a chicken and eat it raw. This is not such great policy in the long run, you lose troops to medical problems.
Remember, Wellington got the cooks up in the middle of the night before Waterloo to ensure that his troops started the day with a full hot meal -- and always claimed that this was the margin of victory, it gave the troops the strength to hang on a couple of extra hours until Blucher finally arrived. Considering the conditions for shipping and cooking food in the field in 1813 (or was it 1814?), these meals were probably a lot worse than MRE's. (And I've eaten MRE's at their worst.) But they were nutritionally complete meals, which rice isn't...
The absolute worst scheme for provisioning an army, ever, was probably Sparta's. Boys started military training at something like 6. They were never fed. They had to steal food, with severe beatings if they got caught. Spartan commanders didn't have to worry about supplies, but I suspect that Sparta's allies would have been very reluctant to have Spartan armies cross their territories...
Yep. During my nine years in the Air Force (1978-87) and three years trotting around Army bases as a contractor, MRE's were the second worst "meal" I ever encountered. Basically, these were plastic bags of mystery goo, which had been reheated in a pot of boiling water.
...), so I do have sympathy for those WWII soldiers that got C-rats or worse (K-rats, like a candy bar designed by a sadistic drill sergeant) for months at a time. But overall, I'd rather eat cold C-rats than warm MRE's, unless they've considerably improved the process since then.
The worst food: Air Force mess hall food, trucked out to a firing range 30 miles of bouncy gravel road away. Apparently there was a steam table or something in the truck to keep it hot, but after being kept hot for over an hour, we weren't sure whether the green goo had once been peas or green beans...
OTOH, the old C-rations (Korean War surplus, I think) weren't bad, if you didn't have to eat them too often. These were little boxes of canned foods ("tins" if you're British). Even the cake for desert was canned, and pretty good, at least compared to the freshly and badly cooked stuff at the mess hall... The selection was rather limited, and in particular, there aren't very many ways canned meat can come out (spam, spam, spam, spam,
And no way could rats gnaw through a C-rat can...
San Mateo has enough resources available to feed its population.
No, it has the money to buy food and water from other sparsely populated areas in the US. Just disrupt civilization, motorized transportation, or the belief that pieces of green paper are actually worth something, and any American city would be in worse shape than Bangladesh... On the average, the US is fairly lightly populated, but that's averaging farmlands with one family per square mile, deserts and mountains with almost no permanent human residents, and densely populated urban areas together..
Trouble is, hardness does not equal impact resistance. Glass is very hard and pretty strong, until a crack starts -- then it runs clear through the material. Aluminum oxide is harder, but I think it's also brittle.
I can't really tell from the extremely bad translations, but it sounds like maybe this is a process analogous to tempering glass -- that is, heat treating it to create internal stresses that limit crack propagation. Probably very expensive. If it would make an unbreakable beer mug at a reasonable price, they'd already have tempered glass unbreakable mugs...
Correct. DOS is good for doing ONE thing at a time -- it loads the program and stays out of the way. A real time OS allows many programs and threads to run at the same time, while guaranteeing that the threads designated as high priority get to run within a certain time. Windows and most unixes multi-task, but don't guarantee that the motor-control thread will get executed again before the thing has run off the end of the track...
I've written a number of data conversion utilities. Often it takes less than 100 lines, and qbasic was pretty good for these little projects because there is no overhead to starting the program, and because basic has always had pretty good string handling. If it looked necessary to process the input byte by byte, or if a lot of data was going to be cranked through it, I'd use c because it runs faster, but often qbasic did the job in about the size of a c "hello world" program.
Example: a circuit board assembly plant gets component X-Y locations in many different file formats from many different customers' CAD systems, and had to be converted to the format used by our placement machines. All these were text files in columnar format, but the X,Y coordinates might be in 1/1000 inches or millimeters, X, Y, and part columns could be in different orders, other information might or might not be included, columns could be separated by tabs or by spaces, if space separated the column locations could differ. Nowadays, the machines come with pretty good import utilities, but that wasn't always true. So, I used to write conversion programs. 1st generation was a different qbasic program for every format received; it would read a line, pick out the x, y, and part strings by position using MID$, or by searching for tabs, convert millimeters to mils if needed, then write it out in the machine format. For the second generation, we had a Visual Basic import one of my programs and dress it up with a form where the user identified the x, y, and part columns, so one program handled all formats.
If I have to do something like this now, I use Excel -- it has a pretty good text file import routine -- and then manually rearrange the columns for the output... But in the 1980's, qbasic was a pretty good tool for small jobs. And it was easy to move from that to QuickBasic (a compiler you bought separately), which could do big projects. I wouldn't recommend it for compilers, an OS, or any 100-man project, but for something that took 1 coder a month to a year, QuickBasic was pretty good.