builders will hate it; not only because removing a nail will be ridiculously difficult, but also because homes that don't fall down don't have to be re-built. If you make your money building homes and you build homes that last forever, then you will eventually become obsolete. The trend since the 1950's has been to build homes using progressively cheaper materials with progressively shorter lifespans.
I keep hearing this theory being batted around - but nowhere have I ever seen (or even heard of) stretches of houses from the 60's or 70's falling down, or even requiring significant increased amounts of maintenance.
As far as being permanent, wooden structures last forever, as long as they are kept dry. Check out the thousand year old timber churches in Scandanavia.
Even in the US, it's not that difficult in the East and South to find wood homes a century old, and with a little difficulty ones even older.
Insulating Concrete Forms are basically like Legos made out of an insulating foam. You stack them together, insert rebar, and fill with concrete. The cost is estimated at 5% more than standard wood frame houses, and are superior in every way.
Superior in every way? [snort] Hardly. Have you ever lived in one? Have you ever tried to remodel one? I've done both - and the concrete house comes off second in virtually every way, especially when remodeling. (And the concrete houses I lived in had conventional flooring over a crawl space - if you build on slab, the situation becomes even worse.)
The team machined a series of barbed rings that extend up the nail's shaft from its point
Boat Nails have been around quite a while; barbs on nails is not new.
Duh. Virtually none of the features on the HurriQuake nail are new. The innovation in this instance comes of 'nailing together two things in such a way as they have never been nailed before'. (Pardon the pun and a tip of the hat to the George Carlin.) I.E. it's the combination of individual features that make this nail 'new'.
The OP's comment is Exhibit 1,000,000,000,000 in why Slashdot needs a '-5 Clueless and/or misses the point' rating.
Last time I checked, Firefox was still open source software. If they're not fixing bugs fast enough for your liking, by all means, download the source and fix them yourself. That's not meant as a smart-ass excuse for not fixing a bug, but the article's author says:
This is such an elitist position and really hurts both opensource in general and Firefox specifically. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that a large marjority of Firefox users, myself included, don't have either the chops nor the time to gain the chops to fix bugs. Also, even if I had the chops to fix bugs, I don't have the time to get familiar with the source tree to be effective. It's not like debuging is a 5 minute deal.
Not only that, but the Mozilla [Corporation|Foundation] is marketing Firefox as a replacement for IE - once you start marketing, it's time to think like a corporation rather than like a bunch of guys in their parent's basement. I.E. being responsive to your user community rather than to simply following your whims or doing what looks to be fun or easy.
I updated to FF 2.0 and downgraded to 1.5 wihtin a few days because 2.0 kept freezing and crashing and to be honest, I didn't seem any new features that made upgrading compelling.
After better than a decade as an unpaid beta tester - in the mid 90's I got off the upgrade treadmill, and don't upgrade until version x.3 or so. FF 2.0 is a clear example of the reasons why I did that.
They've been criticized in the past for faking demonstrations.
Only an idiot would believe the video proves anything. I mean, who here believes that the same software, on the same hardware, running the same startup sequence in virtually the same enviroment... would behave noticeably differently in it's first five minutes of 'life'? This video sequence (and the comments on YouTube) says more about those sheeple who reflexively think corporations cheat rather than bothering to think things through.
That's what typically happens when marketing is out of touch with engineering. My educated guess would be that marketing droids "forgot" to mention this promotion to engineering. If they did, assuming that Amazon's tech team is any good, this idea would get shot down pretty quickly as one which would creating a DOS attack.
Ah yes, that famous conceit of IT workers... That, somehow, *they* are the ones who decides what is good for the company and what is not, based on whether or not *they* will be inconvenienced. (And of course it's never IT's fault, because they can't be bothered to find out what promotions are coming up - after all, this is the first year ever with a busy holiday shopping season.)
And of course it was the tech team which ended up spending its holidays fixing the site, not marketing.
Never mind the fact that keeping the site up is the tech teams job in the first place.
The electromagnet not used to hold anything together. The energy is just "stored" in the coils and when you remove the power supply the field dissipates.
A dissapating magnetic field is a moving magnetic field. What happens when you have a magnetic field is moving in relation to any conductors? That's right - you create a generator.
Lots of nations standardize their own native language and regulate its use, so I don't see why a group of people cannot regulate the use of their own language.
The problems is - you confuse two different senses of the word 'use'.
In the first instance ('nations standardize their own native language and regulate its use') the word 'use' means to define the style and syntax of a language, much like ANSI or ISO might do for a programming language. (The French of course are infamous for doing so.)
In the second instance ('why a group of people cannot regulate the use of their own language'), the word 'use' means to control who gets to run the 'language' and under what circumstances. (Think of EULA's.)
But the Faget Shuttle would have to do some kind of Alley Oop maneuver at subsonic speed to transition from a full stall pancake attitude to proper flight on those straight wings, and there was some concern about doing that stall recovery safely.
It wasn't just flight characteristics that caused the rejection of the Faget type Shuttle, tere were also serious concerns about reentry areodynamics. The sharp junction of wing and body in particular lead to shock waves impinging on the vehicle body, which means the the area where the shockwave impinges is subjected to full reentry heating instead of being protected by the shockwave the way the Shuttle is, as are capsule type vehicles. (The ablatives or tiles merely protect against the heat radiated from this shockwave.) Additionally, there were concerns about weight problems with the 'hot structure' type of heatshield, as well as engineering problems with accommodating thermal expansion.
It's a common belief that the Faget Shuttle was rejected because of the USAF's requirements - but that belief is wrong. NASA was already moving away from the big 'balloon' (internal tankage) orbiters and towards smaller, denser orbiters protected by tiles (which were easier and cheaper to engineer) and having an external tank. (The SRB's came about fairly late in the process, and likely would have been inevitable even without USAF participation.)
NASA wants to go back to the Apollo style reentry and landing but probably on land using parachutes and landing rockets like Soyuz and the Chinese spacecraft. You save big time on weight and there are safety advantages in terms of heat tile damage, but this low-control landing has problems of its own.
A capsule designed to use ballistic lift (which Apollo was and Soyuz is not entirely) does not have 'low control' - Apollo routinely came down within 3 kilometers of its splashdown target. (And they didn't even try particularly hard.) With modern guidance systems there is no particular reason to expect misses (on average) to exceed 1 kilometer, _without_ parasails or other complications.
Given that the U.S. government and military has made it obvious that it plans to dominate space
Sure - in some paranoid fantasy universe. Here in the real world our space policy is pretty much the same as our air and sea policies, "the US uses this and reserves the right to protect our usage from interference". (If you haven't read the policy, I suggest you do. The linked article is based on some fantasy - not on the actual policy.)
A few of these shuttles in orbit at any one time could provide the ability to quickly take out other countries space capabilities without being as obvious as using a ground based laser or missile. Plus it would be far more accurate.
Sure - in some Star Trek universe where the laws of physics have been suspended. Here in the real world, you'd need fuel tanks the size of a medium oil tanker for 'a few' to knock out any significant fraction of other countries space capabilities. (Worse yet, they'd be *more* obvious - because when their orbits changed to intercept, observers would know Something Is Up.)
I'm not sure I understand this correctly; from the quote (in the article which I DID read) it seems like the metric of success is who they are including.
Sadly, the quote lacks context - it was a reply to a question, and we don't know what the question was.
It seems that the technology is just a bigass filter. The smallest particles in the filter, crumb rubber, are 1 mm or so across. So what? That may give you clear water, but it won't filter out the bacteria, viruses, dissolved organic contaminants, etc.
So what? The filters this is meant to replace (in water treatment plants) don't either.
Thus anyone claiming that they can convert heat into electricity is lying, stupid, or discovering new laws of the universe.
Says the guy who just pronounced something vital to many space missions of the past, present, and future.
What this device does is convert heat differentials into electricity- similar to a steam generator, but without the moving parts.
I don't know if you simply don't know how steam generators work - or if you are merely a pedantic idiot who simply doesn't know how steam generators work. (I suspect the latter.)
Re:Please don't click this unethical story.
on
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From TFA:
Gmail was the first desktop client like email reader
Methinks the original writer has never actually actually used a desktop email program. Compared to Eudora (or even (shudder) Outlook) Gmail lacks important features (like being able to sort your mail by sender, title, date....).
The biggest problem with all of this is the damn Egyptians, they've got around 6,000 years of continuous history and at no time have we found any hieroglyphics that say
"Damn it was wet this year, I don't mean a little bit it absolutely pissed down and everybody died"
Actually they do have hieroglyphics that depict a great flood:
"Nu, the Egyptian god of the Primeval Sea, is represented on the marble sarcophagus of Seti I as being up to his waist in water with arms upraised to carry the Solar Boat across the Sky. He is said to have held the royal occupants of this boat above the flood waters engulfing their mountainous island home in the West. Nu had been ordered to bring about this very flood by Atum in order to purify the world (Budge, 1960)."[http://www.atlantisquest.com/Hiero.html]
Apples and oranges. The flood you mentioned above happened before historical times according to the legend. OTOH, the biblical plagues happened (according to the Bible) during historical time.
This is a project that should be open sourced. I bet there are alot of folks that would love to work on something like this.
Sure - they'd love to work on it. The question is, can they actually bring anything useful to the table? Designing a simulator/trainer with reasonable fidelity is a very different thing from designing a game.
enterprises also want paralleling clusters and failover clusters. The open source databases are getting there, give it few more years.
The one place that the Open Source products have a long way to go is support. Companies don't think mysql and postgres are unreliable, they're just not backed enough.
Both the parent and the grandparent are correct - but the parent hits the nail on the head with:
The company I work for could give a rat's hindquarters about TCO -- they just want to outsource their risk so that if something breaks, the CIO/CEO/Chairman has someone to argue with.
*Precisely*. What F/OSS advocates don't get is that TCO is but one factor in determining what package to use.
Only in a world where magical faries produce pixie dust that can replace petrochemicals while the fusion plants replaces the fraction of Middle East oil that is used for energy.
It's always interesting how we're trying to predict when scientific breakthroughs will occur. Isn't it the nature of science such that breakthroughs happen when you don't expect them?
ITER is mostly about engineering - but breakthroughs in engineering happen too, and are often needed.
This isn't really science, it's more like engineering. Engineering at the edge of what is currently possibly, admittedly, but still engineering. It's unlikely that significant new scientific breakthroughs will come of this.
Engineering is needed too... Because before investing tens (or more likely hundreds) of billions of dollars into new powerplants we need to validate that the hardware actually behaves like the equations and theories say it should. When moving into the fringes of the possible - nature has a nasty way of not cooperating.
And that's been the real problem with fusion for a couple of decades now - it's been in that grey area between science and engineering. Build an instrument (facility), test theory against reality, develop new theories and methods, lather, rinse, repeat.
That's because Voyager is nuclear powered. Good luck getting the masses to approve shooting up another nuclear power package.
That's the prevalent meme - but the reality is that space based nuclear power has gotten steadily less controversial. The Mars Science Laboratory Rover will almost certainly be nuclear powered - and the proposal to do so has drawn nary a peep.
Because I read and follow the news. Or do you think that trends that are moving one way, and are already at a massive deficit, will somehow magically reverse themselves before 2008?
But who ten years ago would have though of scaling a server-farm as a search-databsae to such proportions before Google and others did it?
Who cares - the comparison of a massively scaled wind farm to a massive scaled server farm is apples and oranges.
I mentioned Google just so one could understand that maybe the only thing preventing one from scaling to such dimensions is the fact that it's "unusual" and not because it's (wrongly though of as) undoable....
ROTFLMAO. You don't think there is a tiny bit of difference between servers scattered across a few hundred feet in a single building - and complex generators the size of a SUV scattered across multiple square miles? You don't think there is a tiny bit of difference between servers that can be fetched in ten minutes to a workbench by a single tech and equipment that will take hours to reach - and require medium industrial equipment and a crew of workers just to get access to?
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I keep hearing this theory being batted around - but nowhere have I ever seen (or even heard of) stretches of houses from the 60's or 70's falling down, or even requiring significant increased amounts of maintenance.
Even in the US, it's not that difficult in the East and South to find wood homes a century old, and with a little difficulty ones even older.
Superior in every way? [snort] Hardly. Have you ever lived in one? Have you ever tried to remodel one? I've done both - and the concrete house comes off second in virtually every way, especially when remodeling. (And the concrete houses I lived in had conventional flooring over a crawl space - if you build on slab, the situation becomes even worse.)
Duh. Virtually none of the features on the HurriQuake nail are new. The innovation in this instance comes of 'nailing together two things in such a way as they have never been nailed before'. (Pardon the pun and a tip of the hat to the George Carlin.) I.E. it's the combination of individual features that make this nail 'new'.
The OP's comment is Exhibit 1,000,000,000,000 in why Slashdot needs a '-5 Clueless and/or misses the point' rating.
Not only that, but the Mozilla [Corporation|Foundation] is marketing Firefox as a replacement for IE - once you start marketing, it's time to think like a corporation rather than like a bunch of guys in their parent's basement. I.E. being responsive to your user community rather than to simply following your whims or doing what looks to be fun or easy.
After better than a decade as an unpaid beta tester - in the mid 90's I got off the upgrade treadmill, and don't upgrade until version x.3 or so. FF 2.0 is a clear example of the reasons why I did that.
Only an idiot would believe the video proves anything. I mean, who here believes that the same software, on the same hardware, running the same startup sequence in virtually the same enviroment... would behave noticeably differently in it's first five minutes of 'life'? This video sequence (and the comments on YouTube) says more about those sheeple who reflexively think corporations cheat rather than bothering to think things through.
Welcome to the real world of science and engineering - where only
Carey Sublette has calculated that several thousand anti static brushes would be needed to provide a sufficient dose.
Ah yes, that famous conceit of IT workers... That, somehow, *they* are the ones who decides what is good for the company and what is not, based on whether or not *they* will be inconvenienced. (And of course it's never IT's fault, because they can't be bothered to find out what promotions are coming up - after all, this is the first year ever with a busy holiday shopping season.)
Never mind the fact that keeping the site up is the tech teams job in the first place.
A dissapating magnetic field is a moving magnetic field. What happens when you have a magnetic field is moving in relation to any conductors? That's right - you create a generator.
The problems is - you confuse two different senses of the word 'use'.
I can't think of any nation that does the latter.
It wasn't just flight characteristics that caused the rejection of the Faget type Shuttle, tere were also serious concerns about reentry areodynamics. The sharp junction of wing and body in particular lead to shock waves impinging on the vehicle body, which means the the area where the shockwave impinges is subjected to full reentry heating instead of being protected by the shockwave the way the Shuttle is, as are capsule type vehicles. (The ablatives or tiles merely protect against the heat radiated from this shockwave.) Additionally, there were concerns about weight problems with the 'hot structure' type of heatshield, as well as engineering problems with accommodating thermal expansion.
It's a common belief that the Faget Shuttle was rejected because of the USAF's requirements - but that belief is wrong. NASA was already moving away from the big 'balloon' (internal tankage) orbiters and towards smaller, denser orbiters protected by tiles (which were easier and cheaper to engineer) and having an external tank. (The SRB's came about fairly late in the process, and likely would have been inevitable even without USAF participation.)
A capsule designed to use ballistic lift (which Apollo was and Soyuz is not entirely) does not have 'low control' - Apollo routinely came down within 3 kilometers of its splashdown target. (And they didn't even try particularly hard.) With modern guidance systems there is no particular reason to expect misses (on average) to exceed 1 kilometer, _without_ parasails or other complications.
Sure - in some paranoid fantasy universe. Here in the real world our space policy is pretty much the same as our air and sea policies, "the US uses this and reserves the right to protect our usage from interference". (If you haven't read the policy, I suggest you do. The linked article is based on some fantasy - not on the actual policy.)
Sure - in some Star Trek universe where the laws of physics have been suspended. Here in the real world, you'd need fuel tanks the size of a medium oil tanker for 'a few' to knock out any significant fraction of other countries space capabilities. (Worse yet, they'd be *more* obvious - because when their orbits changed to intercept, observers would know Something Is Up.)
Sadly, the quote lacks context - it was a reply to a question, and we don't know what the question was.
So what? The filters this is meant to replace (in water treatment plants) don't either.
Says the guy who just pronounced something vital to many space missions of the past, present, and future.
I don't know if you simply don't know how steam generators work - or if you are merely a pedantic idiot who simply doesn't know how steam generators work. (I suspect the latter.)
Methinks the original writer has never actually actually used a desktop email program. Compared to Eudora (or even (shudder) Outlook) Gmail lacks important features (like being able to sort your mail by sender, title, date....).
Apples and oranges. The flood you mentioned above happened before historical times according to the legend. OTOH, the biblical plagues happened (according to the Bible) during historical time.
Sure - they'd love to work on it. The question is, can they actually bring anything useful to the table? Designing a simulator/trainer with reasonable fidelity is a very different thing from designing a game.
Both the parent and the grandparent are correct - but the parent hits the nail on the head with:
*Precisely*. What F/OSS advocates don't get is that TCO is but one factor in determining what package to use.
Only in a world where magical faries produce pixie dust that can replace petrochemicals while the fusion plants replaces the fraction of Middle East oil that is used for energy.
ITER is mostly about engineering - but breakthroughs in engineering happen too, and are often needed.
Engineering is needed too... Because before investing tens (or more likely hundreds) of billions of dollars into new powerplants we need to validate that the hardware actually behaves like the equations and theories say it should. When moving into the fringes of the possible - nature has a nasty way of not cooperating.
And that's been the real problem with fusion for a couple of decades now - it's been in that grey area between science and engineering. Build an instrument (facility), test theory against reality, develop new theories and methods, lather, rinse, repeat.
That's the prevalent meme - but the reality is that space based nuclear power has gotten steadily less controversial. The Mars Science Laboratory Rover will almost certainly be nuclear powered - and the proposal to do so has drawn nary a peep.
Because I read and follow the news. Or do you think that trends that are moving one way, and are already at a massive deficit, will somehow magically reverse themselves before 2008?
Who cares - the comparison of a massively scaled wind farm to a massive scaled server farm is apples and oranges.
ROTFLMAO. You don't think there is a tiny bit of difference between servers scattered across a few hundred feet in a single building - and complex generators the size of a SUV scattered across multiple square miles? You don't think there is a tiny bit of difference between servers that can be fetched in ten minutes to a workbench by a single tech and equipment that will take hours to reach - and require medium industrial equipment and a crew of workers just to get access to?
Apples and oranges.