Executives raping the company may not be accurate.
From what I understand of their revenue plan, they are no longer selling any products, nor supporting any products, nor making any real money anywhere else. Why do they still have ANY employees?
Executives won't fire themselves, but it seems to me they have to have cut most of their staff loose by now...
If people know differently, please grace us with your wisdom?
The role of Samantha Carter (played by Amanda Tapping) is a great boost to women. WE NAMED OUR DAUGHTER 'CARTER' AFTER HER (and the president).
I recognize that they give Carter too many responsibilities (being uber-brilliant and super-soldier). My wife commented that they got rid of the Dr. Janet Frasier (played by Teryl Rothery) to make sure the show wasn't too heavy with women in top positions, that would be threatening.
I doubt my wife is correct, but she makes a good point. Are they going to replace and add characters to regain the male / female balance on this show?
One of the PREMIER COOL things that shows like Stargate do, IMHO, is allow stodgey males (young and old) to VIEW women soldiers, and thus experience them as highly capable, rough-and-tumble, smart, and fallible human beings.
Just seeing a woman in a role allows you to change your preconceptions of what roles people should be in. That goes for having a handicapped person (amputee, maybe) working in the SGC as a technician. The part would be small, in the background, but it would make a big difference in how people saw people with physical limitations.
The original Star Trek put a black woman in a senior leadership position (Lieuntenant Uhura, communications officer, okay, it isn't a huge department, but it's important, and it's on the bridge). That redefined what was possible for black women both on TV and off.
I hope Stargate continues to push boundaries and explore what we perceive as normal.
Of course, they could just ignite a firestorm and introduce a Gua'ould named Jesus. Or another namd 'Moshe' (Moses). Or another named, 'Siddhartha'. Or 'Mohammed'. I would recommend they stay out of that territory, though, there'd be LOTS of pushback from their fanbase and zealots alike.
Your nerd privileges have been revoked. You must now go hang out with the jocks.
It's not _that_ bad. He should just have to hang out with the Band geeks, and learn their lingo before returning.
Ombrurshure
8th position trombone
26-inch step
split reed
7th-grade oboe
bassoon strap
2nd chair blues
tight embrasure
After all, the jocks don't respect nerds, but band geeks cross many high school subcultures.
If the writers at Sci-Fi's Stargate shows understood their target audiences, they would feature many references to the above and other in-jokes from high school subcultures that could be dropped in to make for greater entertainment value.
Yes, but the end of the fiber would trail across the Earth as the Earth turned. The moon takes 30 days to go around the earth, the day takes (ah-Hah!) 1 day to go around, thus the cable would be traveling about 1000 miles an hour, would heat up and fail, which would just wreck the climbing scenario.
Unless!! You could run 1000 mph to jump on, climb VERY FAST to get above the atmosphere before it failed, and carry enough oxy water and food to climb the 286,000 miles up to the moon. Okay, there'd be no gravity after the first 40,000 miles or so, but it's those first 40,000 miles that really GETCHA. Feel tha burn, baby! No Pain, no Gain!
Yah, but beaming microwaves in significant power ranges would be lethal or at least significantly toxic to humans near the beam path.
This would be okay for unmanned loads such as resupply, but obviously a bad idea for manned transport.
I don't want to stand within sight of the transmitter either, without standing in a nicely sealed thick metal room with lots of faraday cage layers outside as well for redundancy. I've seen what microwaves can do to meat (last night at dinner).
But perhaps not impossible. What I'm proposing is to have the end in mind when designing the machinery.
IDEA: Perhaps fabricating nanotubes with a deliberate molecular flaw that allows attachment of another hydrophilic molecule, say, "HPM A". Then have a hydrophobic molecule B ("HPM B") similarly. Arrange for HPM-A and HPM-B to fold at a specific set of temperatures and have HPM-B disengage at that point.
In otherwords, build a molecular assembly device that manufactures a specific pattern of flat chainmail cloth, then cut it into a long strip.
Good point about the junctures being squeezed, this may cause loss of strength, but I'm not counting on it.
I read about it too, and they also mentioned the mean size of the dust particles was on the order of 2 microns. This means that the dust is very, very fine.
Fine dust is difficult to get rid of with normal means like mechanical removal; you have to suspend the dust in a solvent (like atmosphere in the case of a blower) and then shunt it away, right?
So, yes, a blower on an arm might be a good idea. I was concerned that the blower itself might clog, or it wouldn't function properly. Funny, NASA is supposed to have a bunch of brainiacs, you'd think they could come up with a mechanism to clean the panels of this size dust particle... Maybe it isn't really as simple as a broom or blower...
Or, maybe it's just that we need an unwashed, stinky guy with a squeegee that can come by when the rover's stopped at a stoplight... (grin). I know some volunteers who are willing to be homeless on Mars...
Larry Niven postulated in a Ringworld or other Known Space writing the existence of what he called 'Sinclair Molecule Chain'.
This substance was a single molecule that was very, very small in diameter, but had a very, very high tensile strength. This was formed into a string and was used in ropes and other stuff for various purposes. It was also useful for cutting things, since the chain was so strong, and the application of force across such a narrow point, that it would cut through most substances easily.
I have some questions:
Has anyone tested this theory with this molecular chain stuff?
Would it make a good knife?
How vulverable is it to shocks (is it elastic or brittle)?
Can I make a better lawnmower blade out of this stuff, much like a super-strong weedwhacker wire?
Would chain mail (see other post) made out of it be bulletproof?
Would it be a good instead of steel in concrete as rebar (since the main bad-thing about reinforced concrete is corrosion of the rebar)?
Would making carbon-fiber composite structures be better with nanotubes, or would it even cut through the glue substrate?
Just some basic questions... Maybe someone from the MIT team that created this stuff can answer them.
If you want a super-strong (tensile strength) fabric, you don't make it by crochet or other weaving methods. You make chain mail with it.
The crucial facts (IMHO) are these:
Nanotubes have very high tensile strength (100 GPa?)
They have very low surface friction
they are difficult to make in long lengths
Snags are inevitable in any real-world situation
The key here is that making a fabric like chain mail, by having nanotubes that are of a specified uniform length like 1/2 cm, formed into a continuous loop (torroid or donut shape), and interlocking these loops in a redundant chain-mail fashion (no pun intended), will lead to exceedingly strong fabric.
However, making a weave, with a long, continuous string, will lead to a fabric that can collapse by the cutting of the string at any point along it's course - this will lead to fraying and the fabric will pull apart.
Solid state physisists, please enlighten us if I'm way off base here, but it certainly seems the better way to go for high-strength tethers and fabrics.
I found that knowing just a few words helped tremendously: Hello, Excuse me/sorry, Thank you / thanks very much, goodbye, yes, no, beautiful, how much, where?
After a while, people would ask a yes/no question, i'd say "Ya Da Si Oui Yes" as a runtogetherword like "yahdahseeweeyes" or "No Nyet". Likewise, the excuse me phrase became: "Scoozee" almost everywhere and "Eezveneetchyeh" (pardon the bad transliterations) as these were widely understood.
How about other phrases, though:
We're very sorry, but we have to search your house/car/pockets for security reasons
We apologize for causing you inconvenience or pain, but we have a job to do
We are only here to search for weapons and explosives.
We do not wish to harm anyone
Please move slowly and keep your hands where we can see them so we know we are safe
We hate surprises;
Please calm down
We will be done soon
Please tell us if anyone else is in this house
If you are worried about your safety, please remember we are worried about both your safety and our safety.
We don't want to cause any trouble here, we want to help.
Please talk very slowly and point at things you're talking about.
I am not deaf. I just do not speak arabic. Please wait for my translator to arrive.
Ummmm... I'm sorry to disappoint, but Iranians speak Farsi, not arabic.
To Quote from the Wikipedia article:
It should be noted that human languages, and the alphabet used to represent those languages in written form, are two different concepts and alphabets are not intrinsic to human languages. As such, Persian and Arabic are two entirely different languages from different linguistic families, with different phonology and grammar.
Persian adds four letters to the Arabic alphabet for its use, due to the fact the four sounds that exist in Persian do not exist in Arabic.
Mod Parent Up. Discussion thread focuses on offense being taken at negative connotations of 'parasitic' when word and concept is neutral.
Note Con: most parasites that affect us do so to our harm.
Note Pro: My wife (after 3 children) has mentioned several times each pregnancy feeling the parasitic nature of the relationship, not grudgingly, but as an acknowledgement of facts.
Alas, diversity of opinion about reproductive issues... Hmm. Imagine that... Combined with mention of hot-button term 'stem cells' in a divisive election year... Let the Flame Wars Begin!
I've thought quite a bit about what happens after an omnicide event (massive plague).
I'm figuring that the U.S. gets repopulated before Chile, because we have nicer infrastructure.
Given, almost eveyone is an immigrant, but if I lived in rural Mexico or Guatemala, a plague wipes out most of my country, I can live where I want, right? So, I either move into a very nice house in Guatelmala, or I move north and find a nice unoccupied 5 bedroom ranch on a big farm near Hoisington, Kansas (a very nice, typical, small farming community).
So, maybe the rest world gets depopulated, but I'm guessing the U.S. and western europe don't. Though, anyone left would probably want to learn english or whatever language everyone around them happens to speak.
Ya gotta wonder what chemical companies have planned to do about operating their 'cannot be shut down in less than a month' toxic-chemical processes if theres an event like this. Will enough workers survive to keep the plant from exploding?
And who guards the weapons and money vaults if eveyone gets sick?
[[ Note: this post is not offtopic because this story brings up a lot of stuff about nuke- and bio-warfare that is obviously touching a nerve amongst us here at Slashdot. ]]
The authoritative mass-audience (non-biochemist) book on biowarfare is 'Plague Wars', by Mangold and Goldberg, amazon is here
This book is copyrighted 1999, but it does not matter. It covers the history of biological warfare from earliest days to current. It is meticulously researched, including many interviews with first-hand participants ranging all over the world. Included as well is in-depth coverage of the true extent of the massive Soviet biowarfare effort, 100,000 people strong, with extensive development and testing.
Re: Soviet bioweapons and how we found out. There was one much-discussed (by anti-bio-warfare activists) event that killed many people (exact quantity unknown, if memory serves it was estimated in the several hundred range). The event was a soviet Anthrax factory where a worker forgot to put a new air filter in when he took out the old one, releasing weapons grade anthrax spores across the city (some small town in south west asia whose name I don't remember, sorry). Initially covered up, the event became public and was confirmed by many of the Soviet program's lead scientists who defected/emigrated to the U.S. or Britain.
The Soviet program was only one of many. Pro-apartheid South Africa had an extensive program and is reputed to have sold a CD-worth of data to Quadaffi on exactly how to synthesize and weaponize various diseases. Many other countries had (and almost assuredly still have) active programs in this area.
Biowarfare agents are doomsday material, and our governments' refusal over the years to sign and enforce treaties has NOT helped. This mostly was at the behest of major pharma companies rather illogically protecting their labs' secrecy at the cost of danger to their customer base, humanity!).
I'm not up to date on what our (U.S.) (military USAAMRID / CDCP) labs are up to in terms of attempting to synthesize antidotes and develop procedures for cope with attacks WHEN they come (not if, this stuff kills too easily to be ignored by terrorists forever, look at the Aum Shinrikyo anthrax attack previous to their Sarin nerve gas attack). I have to trust that my leaders make good decisions, and try to vote for people who take the threat seriously and devote money to the science and R&D.
One thing though is that my wife and I have spoken about this and we will not live in a major city. Metro area, maybe, but not the city itself, its too dangerous. You can bet anytime someone mentions a new new mystery disease making the rounds I'm going to take vacation, though, and/or work from home until we find out the extent of it.
I don't scare easily; there's lots of madness in the world and most of it doesn't affect my quiet life. But, this book... let me in on how our foreign policy needs to change. We can't catch all the terrorists, so we have to build "bridges" to reduce the hatred. Let's hope that hatred doesn't teach us lessons grief that prevent further lessons in shared joyful caring from ever happening.
Robert Guillaume was Benson, the african-american chief of staff to the Governor in the TV show of the same name.
I can't believe people are quoting 'Fish Police' as his most famous appearance. I think most people would know him from Benson.
On the other hand, many of the people here were in Fish Police. I looked it up. Everybody was in that show! I can't believe it failed, given the cast. Too bad.
Michelle Forbes was ensign Ro Laren on STTNG (Star Trek NextGen). She was Bejoran and had a funky earring: two ring piercings at the top and bottom of the ear with a small chain between them that dangled a bit.
Ro was known for being... independently minded, was (as all movie stars are) quite attractive.
Some would argue that her character, and those fellow Bejorans in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine series, were supposed to be the 'Arabs' of the Federation. It is a popular conception that the cold war colored Star Trek's political landscape. The Federation (humans) were the United States, The Russians were the Klingons. The Romulans were the Chinese. The Vulcans were not assignable easily; one could say they were the Swiss, but it's hard to say.
Regardless, Ro played a character that had personal and professional problems that started with her upbringing on an occupied world, and meant that she was not subservient to human / Federation dictates, just being there for the ride.
Interesting to note she's still working; of course she was talented. But the ST:TNG scripts sometimes limited the actors/actresses by putting the role of women into stereotyped containers (think: low cut short-skirts on Troi in season 1). They tried to presume equality (doctors are female), but sometimes it didn't mesh with Keeping Teenage Boys Watching. Ro was sort of a 'bad girl' that was good at heart but didn't want to be, by my reading.
"Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!" (Reference: protecting children from online porn).
Think of the children? What about the adolescents?! As an adolescent myself, I had a great interest in the porn industry, from a purely... "research-driven" point of view (grin).
I get fed up with the pr0n == evil crowd, especially in the conservative-religious parts of the U.S. (and its representatives in the U.S. court system). Yah, there's some evil exploitation there, agreed, it's a legal form of prostitution to have sex for money in front of a camera (which probably pisses them off to no end). But, for the most part that I've seen, there's also a lot of good clean artistic (jerkoff) photography.
Masterbation is not evil, it's safe sex, and I would think the religious crowd would be supporting it to some degree. After all, what practical solution would YOU offer an ultra-horney 16 year old boy or girl? (yes, normal girls get horney too, get over it). That's right, tell them to solve their problem, but do it alone, and leave the stuff that has adult consequences for when they're an adult.
Somehow I really doubt that this company (which i've never heard of) really invented the concept of online pr0n. When did playboy.com start? When did the first porn site go up? When was http invented? Talk to some of the guys back at U of Illinois who wrote the percursor to Apache (NCSI?). They were college students - they probably tried sending compressed (zipped) video or.bmp still photos at some point.
Compressing video is vital to sending it over the net, and video is almost by definition, entertainment- so whoever sent the first video file and the first streaming video feed (I doubt they're the same organization/person) wins that prior art bid.
We had curmudgeonly old farts in plaid flannel shirts and ugly ties; long-haired wierdos in heavy metal t-shirts, jeans, and hiking boots; engineering guys in white shirts and ties that were too smart to stay long; otherwise normal-looking seikhs dudes (with various colors of turbans) trying to finish some project and not talking to people; and otherwise GENERALLY NO WOMEN WHATSOEVER which really sucked. Especially because at the time I was single and had no attractiveness of which I was aware.
It's a widely recognized fact that most of the legal community (law firms, etc.) used to use WordPerfect. I'm unsure of the current situation given WP's decline in popularity due to domination by MSOffice.
However, if whoever owns WordPerfect now (Corel? Novell? Underpants Gnomes?) would re-issue it on Linux, and provide favorable licensing to allow it to run from the server to the desktop nicely, many legal offices and courts that currently use WordPerfect could move to Linux far easier than to MSOffice. It would be a change of OS and NOT a change of application.
Any lawyers out there that can comment on what software (especially larger) legal firms are using, and on what platforms, and for what reasons?
I would wager that another large tipping-point factor would be how Lexus and Nexus are used. If they operate via a web portal instead of a fat client (Lawyers? Paralegals? Anyone know?) then making sure they operate nicely on Linux is a key adoption factor. IBM, are you listening? Law firms might like a suite of applications specially tailored to their needs, and they don't mind paying for high functionality if it gets them ease of use (not being typically technofiles).
Also, billing software, the back-office function of legal offices, might benefit from some kind of scheduling application that keeps track of which case someone's researching and thus bills time to that case in an easy manner.
An ex-lawyer friend of mine (now works as NOC designer for Siemens) mentioned what a pain in the butt it was to itemize his timesheet (bill) for 10 minute segments of his time, espeically if he was making lots of calls. Make a better application and they will love you (again, IBM or Novell, you have options here... and not only for US court systems).
Soon Linux will become the bailiff, judge, jury, court illustrator, public defender, janitor, and CourTV anchor.
dum-da-da-dah-dum, dum-da-da-dah-dum (tune of March of the Valkiries) HERE COME DA PENGUIN! HERE COME DA PENGUIN! (reference to Flip Wilson on Laugh-In)
This interests me. I've heard about mining asteroids, and speaking of the percent of them that are iron, nickel, copper, platinum, etc.
I have questions
In gold mines, what percentage is ore vs. gold?
Likewise platinum mines?
what method is used to separate gold from the ore?
what techniques could be used to separate desired metals from the ore, given constraints of lifting smelter equip. to space, and operating in zero or generated (centriptal) "gravity"?
how much energy is required to heat iron to boiling, and given that, has anyone tried (in an actual college-experiment) to ionize it and run it through a high-impulse engine?
would the constraints of a space-based nuclear-thermal powerplant be sufficient to run this king of engine?
In terms of which asteroid to use, more questions:
has anyone made an actual list of viable cantidate asteroids?
what conceivable delta-v could we impart to a hunk of rock that's medium sized, say 100 to 500 meters diameter?
what is the ideal asteroid size for such a venture? Probably small so we could get it done before, oh, say, NEVER...
Do we have a list of near Earth asteroids that fit the description, or is 100 meters too small to find?
presuming we'd want to drill into the asteroid to set up temporary shelter (radiation protection, etc.), has anyone worked out how to do this with shaped charges, directed energy (reflected light), or other drilling techniques?
Just some musings / wonderings / ideas, here...
I had an idea for a smelter once: break off a chunk of asteroid, wrap it in silvered mylar to reflect radiant heat back in, put it at the center of a giant parabolic reflector dish, melt it using solar energy, spin it to generate gravity, and the densest materials will condense on the outside at the equator, right? Of course, if you seal it up ahead of time the outgassing may include oxygen, nitrogen, etc., which you can separate by liquid diffraction (?).
Yes, but is it TRANSPARENT? I want Transparent steel! I want an invisible jet! and an Invisible Sword! and an Invisible Toaster so I can see the toast get dark As It Happens! (grin)
The article doesn't mention if it has superior resistance to rust, though. This just talks about the crystal size.
QUESTION: It would seem to me that an ordered solid crystal, such as ordinary steel or glass, would have superior strength, due to every atom having the maximum number of molecular bonds with its neighbors.
Why, then, is a disordered solid superior in the tensile strength department? Are there any web links that show this effect?
Cross breeding may take a while, though, so maybe by the time I'm not allowed to have caffeine anymore (vis-a-vis old age restrictions on my cardiac function) I'll have that option.
Granted, I'm not 18 anymore, but I'm not 40 yet either.
Slashdot Mirror
General Chuck Yeager (I believe) said of the F-111:
There isn't enough thrust in Christendom to make that plane fly well.
(give or take the quote).
Executives raping the company may not be accurate.
From what I understand of their revenue plan, they are no longer selling any products, nor supporting any products, nor making any real money anywhere else. Why do they still have ANY employees?
Executives won't fire themselves, but it seems to me they have to have cut most of their staff loose by now...
If people know differently, please grace us with your wisdom?
The role of Samantha Carter (played by Amanda Tapping) is a great boost to women. WE NAMED OUR DAUGHTER 'CARTER' AFTER HER (and the president).
I recognize that they give Carter too many responsibilities (being uber-brilliant and super-soldier). My wife commented that they got rid of the Dr. Janet Frasier (played by Teryl Rothery) to make sure the show wasn't too heavy with women in top positions, that would be threatening.
I doubt my wife is correct, but she makes a good point. Are they going to replace and add characters to regain the male / female balance on this show?
One of the PREMIER COOL things that shows like Stargate do, IMHO, is allow stodgey males (young and old) to VIEW women soldiers, and thus experience them as highly capable, rough-and-tumble, smart, and fallible human beings.
Just seeing a woman in a role allows you to change your preconceptions of what roles people should be in. That goes for having a handicapped person (amputee, maybe) working in the SGC as a technician. The part would be small, in the background, but it would make a big difference in how people saw people with physical limitations.
The original Star Trek put a black woman in a senior leadership position (Lieuntenant Uhura, communications officer, okay, it isn't a huge department, but it's important, and it's on the bridge). That redefined what was possible for black women both on TV and off.
I hope Stargate continues to push boundaries and explore what we perceive as normal.
Of course, they could just ignite a firestorm and introduce a Gua'ould named Jesus. Or another namd 'Moshe' (Moses). Or another named, 'Siddhartha'. Or 'Mohammed'. I would recommend they stay out of that territory, though, there'd be LOTS of pushback from their fanbase and zealots alike.
-- Kevin J. Rice
Your nerd privileges have been revoked. You must now go hang out with the jocks.
It's not _that_ bad. He should just have to hang out with the Band geeks, and learn their lingo before returning.
- Ombrurshure
- 8th position trombone
- 26-inch step
- split reed
- 7th-grade oboe
- bassoon strap
- 2nd chair blues
- tight embrasure
After all, the jocks don't respect nerds, but band geeks cross many high school subcultures.If the writers at Sci-Fi's Stargate shows understood their target audiences, they would feature many references to the above and other in-jokes from high school subcultures that could be dropped in to make for greater entertainment value.
Yes, but the end of the fiber would trail across the Earth as the Earth turned. The moon takes 30 days to go around the earth, the day takes (ah-Hah!) 1 day to go around, thus the cable would be traveling about 1000 miles an hour, would heat up and fail, which would just wreck the climbing scenario.
Unless!! You could run 1000 mph to jump on, climb VERY FAST to get above the atmosphere before it failed, and carry enough oxy water and food to climb the 286,000 miles up to the moon. Okay, there'd be no gravity after the first 40,000 miles or so, but it's those first 40,000 miles that really GETCHA. Feel tha burn, baby! No Pain, no Gain!
Yah, but beaming microwaves in significant power ranges would be lethal or at least significantly toxic to humans near the beam path.
This would be okay for unmanned loads such as resupply, but obviously a bad idea for manned transport.
I don't want to stand within sight of the transmitter either, without standing in a nicely sealed thick metal room with lots of faraday cage layers outside as well for redundancy. I've seen what microwaves can do to meat (last night at dinner).
Yes, okay, it's hard to make.
But perhaps not impossible. What I'm proposing is to have the end in mind when designing the machinery.
IDEA: Perhaps fabricating nanotubes with a deliberate molecular flaw that allows attachment of another hydrophilic molecule, say, "HPM A". Then have a hydrophobic molecule B ("HPM B") similarly. Arrange for HPM-A and HPM-B to fold at a specific set of temperatures and have HPM-B disengage at that point.
In otherwords, build a molecular assembly device that manufactures a specific pattern of flat chainmail cloth, then cut it into a long strip.
Good point about the junctures being squeezed, this may cause loss of strength, but I'm not counting on it.
-- Kevin J. Rice
I read about it too, and they also mentioned the mean size of the dust particles was on the order of 2 microns. This means that the dust is very, very fine.
Fine dust is difficult to get rid of with normal means like mechanical removal; you have to suspend the dust in a solvent (like atmosphere in the case of a blower) and then shunt it away, right?
So, yes, a blower on an arm might be a good idea. I was concerned that the blower itself might clog, or it wouldn't function properly. Funny, NASA is supposed to have a bunch of brainiacs, you'd think they could come up with a mechanism to clean the panels of this size dust particle... Maybe it isn't really as simple as a broom or blower...
Or, maybe it's just that we need an unwashed, stinky guy with a squeegee that can come by when the rover's stopped at a stoplight... (grin). I know some volunteers who are willing to be homeless on Mars...
This substance was a single molecule that was very, very small in diameter, but had a very, very high tensile strength. This was formed into a string and was used in ropes and other stuff for various purposes. It was also useful for cutting things, since the chain was so strong, and the application of force across such a narrow point, that it would cut through most substances easily.
I have some questions:
Just some basic questions... Maybe someone from the MIT team that created this stuff can answer them.
--Kevin J. Rice
Can no one see the fault in this scenario?
If you want a super-strong (tensile strength) fabric, you don't make it by crochet or other weaving methods. You make chain mail with it.
The crucial facts (IMHO) are these:
- Nanotubes have very high tensile strength (100 GPa?)
- They have very low surface friction
- they are difficult to make in long lengths
- Snags are inevitable in any real-world situation
The key here is that making a fabric like chain mail, by having nanotubes that are of a specified uniform length like 1/2 cm, formed into a continuous loop (torroid or donut shape), and interlocking these loops in a redundant chain-mail fashion (no pun intended), will lead to exceedingly strong fabric.However, making a weave, with a long, continuous string, will lead to a fabric that can collapse by the cutting of the string at any point along it's course - this will lead to fraying and the fabric will pull apart.
Solid state physisists, please enlighten us if I'm way off base here, but it certainly seems the better way to go for high-strength tethers and fabrics.
Humbly but convincedly,
--Kevin J. Rice
I found that knowing just a few words helped tremendously:
Hello, Excuse me/sorry, Thank you / thanks very much, goodbye, yes, no, beautiful, how much, where?
After a while, people would ask a yes/no question, i'd say "Ya Da Si Oui Yes" as a runtogetherword like "yahdahseeweeyes" or "No Nyet". Likewise, the excuse me phrase became: "Scoozee" almost everywhere and "Eezveneetchyeh" (pardon the bad transliterations) as these were widely understood.
How about other phrases, though:
Ummmm... I'm sorry to disappoint, but Iranians speak Farsi, not arabic.
To Quote from the Wikipedia article:
It should be noted that human languages, and the alphabet used to represent those languages in written form, are two different concepts and alphabets are not intrinsic to human languages. As such, Persian and Arabic are two entirely different languages from different linguistic families, with different phonology and grammar.
Persian adds four letters to the Arabic alphabet for its use, due to the fact the four sounds that exist in Persian do not exist in Arabic.
Mod Parent Up. Discussion thread focuses on offense being taken at negative connotations of 'parasitic' when word and concept is neutral.
Note Con: most parasites that affect us do so to our harm.
Note Pro: My wife (after 3 children) has mentioned several times each pregnancy feeling the parasitic nature of the relationship, not grudgingly, but as an acknowledgement of facts.
Alas, diversity of opinion about reproductive issues... Hmm. Imagine that... Combined with mention of hot-button term 'stem cells' in a divisive election year... Let the Flame Wars Begin!
I'm a guy! Males can't get pregnant! No Fair!
Maybe something like THIS might be possible eventually, though.
-- Kevin J. Rice
I've thought quite a bit about what happens after an omnicide event (massive plague).
I'm figuring that the U.S. gets repopulated before Chile, because we have nicer infrastructure.
Given, almost eveyone is an immigrant, but if I lived in rural Mexico or Guatemala, a plague wipes out most of my country, I can live where I want, right? So, I either move into a very nice house in Guatelmala, or I move north and find a nice unoccupied 5 bedroom ranch on a big farm near Hoisington, Kansas (a very nice, typical, small farming community).
So, maybe the rest world gets depopulated, but I'm guessing the U.S. and western europe don't. Though, anyone left would probably want to learn english or whatever language everyone around them happens to speak.
Ya gotta wonder what chemical companies have planned to do about operating their 'cannot be shut down in less than a month' toxic-chemical processes if theres an event like this. Will enough workers survive to keep the plant from exploding?
And who guards the weapons and money vaults if eveyone gets sick?
--Kevin J. Rice
[[ Note: this post is not offtopic because this story brings up a lot of stuff about nuke- and bio-warfare that is obviously touching a nerve amongst us here at Slashdot. ]]
/emigrated to the U.S. or Britain.
... let me in on how our foreign policy needs to change. We can't catch all the terrorists, so we have to build "bridges" to reduce the hatred. Let's hope that hatred doesn't teach us lessons grief that prevent further lessons in shared joyful caring from ever happening.
The authoritative mass-audience (non-biochemist) book on biowarfare is 'Plague Wars', by Mangold and Goldberg, amazon is here
This book is copyrighted 1999, but it does not matter. It covers the history of biological warfare from earliest days to current. It is meticulously researched, including many interviews with first-hand participants ranging all over the world. Included as well is in-depth coverage of the true extent of the massive Soviet biowarfare effort, 100,000 people strong, with extensive development and testing.
Re: Soviet bioweapons and how we found out. There was one much-discussed (by anti-bio-warfare activists) event that killed many people (exact quantity unknown, if memory serves it was estimated in the several hundred range). The event was a soviet Anthrax factory where a worker forgot to put a new air filter in when he took out the old one, releasing weapons grade anthrax spores across the city (some small town in south west asia whose name I don't remember, sorry). Initially covered up, the event became public and was confirmed by many of the Soviet program's lead scientists who defected
The Soviet program was only one of many. Pro-apartheid South Africa had an extensive program and is reputed to have sold a CD-worth of data to Quadaffi on exactly how to synthesize and weaponize various diseases. Many other countries had (and almost assuredly still have) active programs in this area.
Biowarfare agents are doomsday material, and our governments' refusal over the years to sign and enforce treaties has NOT helped. This mostly was at the behest of major pharma companies rather illogically protecting their labs' secrecy at the cost of danger to their customer base, humanity!).
I'm not up to date on what our (U.S.) (military USAAMRID / CDCP) labs are up to in terms of attempting to synthesize antidotes and develop procedures for cope with attacks WHEN they come (not if, this stuff kills too easily to be ignored by terrorists forever, look at the Aum Shinrikyo anthrax attack previous to their Sarin nerve gas attack). I have to trust that my leaders make good decisions, and try to vote for people who take the threat seriously and devote money to the science and R&D.
One thing though is that my wife and I have spoken about this and we will not live in a major city. Metro area, maybe, but not the city itself, its too dangerous. You can bet anytime someone mentions a new new mystery disease making the rounds I'm going to take vacation, though, and/or work from home until we find out the extent of it.
I don't scare easily; there's lots of madness in the world and most of it doesn't affect my quiet life. But, this book
-- Kevin J. Rice
Robert Guillaume was Benson, the african-american chief of staff to the Governor in the TV show of the same name.
I can't believe people are quoting 'Fish Police' as his most famous appearance. I think most people would know him from Benson.
On the other hand, many of the people here were in Fish Police. I looked it up. Everybody was in that show! I can't believe it failed, given the cast. Too bad.
-- Kevin J. Rice
Michelle Forbes was ensign Ro Laren on STTNG (Star Trek NextGen). She was Bejoran and had a funky earring: two ring piercings at the top and bottom of the ear with a small chain between them that dangled a bit.
... independently minded, was (as all movie stars are) quite attractive.
Ro was known for being
Some would argue that her character, and those fellow Bejorans in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine series, were supposed to be the 'Arabs' of the Federation. It is a popular conception that the cold war colored Star Trek's political landscape. The Federation (humans) were the United States, The Russians were the Klingons. The Romulans were the Chinese. The Vulcans were not assignable easily; one could say they were the Swiss, but it's hard to say.
Regardless, Ro played a character that had personal and professional problems that started with her upbringing on an occupied world, and meant that she was not subservient to human / Federation dictates, just being there for the ride.
Interesting to note she's still working; of course she was talented. But the ST:TNG scripts sometimes limited the actors/actresses by putting the role of women into stereotyped containers (think: low cut short-skirts on Troi in season 1). They tried to presume equality (doctors are female), but sometimes it didn't mesh with Keeping Teenage Boys Watching. Ro was sort of a 'bad girl' that was good at heart but didn't want to be, by my reading.
-- Kevin J. Rice
"Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!" (Reference: protecting children from online porn).
.bmp still photos at some point.
Think of the children? What about the adolescents?! As an adolescent myself, I had a great interest in the porn industry, from a purely... "research-driven" point of view (grin).
I get fed up with the pr0n == evil crowd, especially in the conservative-religious parts of the U.S. (and its representatives in the U.S. court system). Yah, there's some evil exploitation there, agreed, it's a legal form of prostitution to have sex for money in front of a camera (which probably pisses them off to no end). But, for the most part that I've seen, there's also a lot of good clean artistic (jerkoff) photography.
Masterbation is not evil, it's safe sex, and I would think the religious crowd would be supporting it to some degree. After all, what practical solution would YOU offer an ultra-horney 16 year old boy or girl? (yes, normal girls get horney too, get over it). That's right, tell them to solve their problem, but do it alone, and leave the stuff that has adult consequences for when they're an adult.
Somehow I really doubt that this company (which i've never heard of) really invented the concept of online pr0n. When did playboy.com start? When did the first porn site go up? When was http invented? Talk to some of the guys back at U of Illinois who wrote the percursor to Apache (NCSI?). They were college students - they probably tried sending compressed (zipped) video or
Compressing video is vital to sending it over the net, and video is almost by definition, entertainment- so whoever sent the first video file and the first streaming video feed (I doubt they're the same organization/person) wins that prior art bid.
-- Kevin J. Rice
Wait a minute!
You had women in your data center??? COOOOOOLLL!
We had curmudgeonly old farts in plaid flannel shirts and ugly ties; long-haired wierdos in heavy metal t-shirts, jeans, and hiking boots; engineering guys in white shirts and ties that were too smart to stay long; otherwise normal-looking seikhs dudes (with various colors of turbans) trying to finish some project and not talking to people; and otherwise GENERALLY NO WOMEN WHATSOEVER which really sucked. Especially because at the time I was single and had no attractiveness of which I was aware.
It's a widely recognized fact that most of the legal community (law firms, etc.) used to use WordPerfect. I'm unsure of the current situation given WP's decline in popularity due to domination by MSOffice.
However, if whoever owns WordPerfect now (Corel? Novell? Underpants Gnomes?) would re-issue it on Linux, and provide favorable licensing to allow it to run from the server to the desktop nicely, many legal offices and courts that currently use WordPerfect could move to Linux far easier than to MSOffice. It would be a change of OS and NOT a change of application.
Any lawyers out there that can comment on what software (especially larger) legal firms are using, and on what platforms, and for what reasons?
I would wager that another large tipping-point factor would be how Lexus and Nexus are used. If they operate via a web portal instead of a fat client (Lawyers? Paralegals? Anyone know?) then making sure they operate nicely on Linux is a key adoption factor. IBM, are you listening? Law firms might like a suite of applications specially tailored to their needs, and they don't mind paying for high functionality if it gets them ease of use (not being typically technofiles).
Also, billing software, the back-office function of legal offices, might benefit from some kind of scheduling application that keeps track of which case someone's researching and thus bills time to that case in an easy manner.
An ex-lawyer friend of mine (now works as NOC designer for Siemens) mentioned what a pain in the butt it was to itemize his timesheet (bill) for 10 minute segments of his time, espeically if he was making lots of calls. Make a better application and they will love you (again, IBM or Novell, you have options here... and not only for US court systems).
-- Kevin J. Rice
Soon Linux will become the bailiff, judge, jury, court illustrator, public defender, janitor, and CourTV anchor.
dum-da-da-dah-dum, dum-da-da-dah-dum (tune of March of the Valkiries) HERE COME DA PENGUIN! HERE COME DA PENGUIN! (reference to Flip Wilson on Laugh-In)
This interests me. I've heard about mining asteroids, and speaking of the percent of them that are iron, nickel, copper, platinum, etc.
I have questions
In terms of which asteroid to use, more questions:
- has anyone made an actual list of viable cantidate asteroids?
- what conceivable delta-v could we impart to a hunk of rock that's medium sized, say 100 to 500 meters diameter?
- what is the ideal asteroid size for such a venture? Probably small so we could get it done before, oh, say, NEVER...
- Do we have a list of near Earth asteroids that fit the description, or is 100 meters too small to find?
- presuming we'd want to drill into the asteroid to set up temporary shelter (radiation protection, etc.), has anyone worked out how to do this with shaped charges, directed energy (reflected light), or other drilling techniques?
Just some musings / wonderings / ideas, here...I had an idea for a smelter once: break off a chunk of asteroid, wrap it in silvered mylar to reflect radiant heat back in, put it at the center of a giant parabolic reflector dish, melt it using solar energy, spin it to generate gravity, and the densest materials will condense on the outside at the equator, right? Of course, if you seal it up ahead of time the outgassing may include oxygen, nitrogen, etc., which you can separate by liquid diffraction (?).
-- Kevin J. Rice (justanyone.com)
Yes, but is it TRANSPARENT? I want Transparent steel! I want an invisible jet! and an Invisible Sword! and an Invisible Toaster so I can see the toast get dark As It Happens! (grin)
The article doesn't mention if it has superior resistance to rust, though. This just talks about the crystal size.
QUESTION: It would seem to me that an ordered solid crystal, such as ordinary steel or glass, would have superior strength, due to every atom having the maximum number of molecular bonds with its neighbors.
Why, then, is a disordered solid superior in the tensile strength department? Are there any web links that show this effect?
-- Kevin J. Rice
Cross breeding may take a while, though, so maybe by the time I'm not allowed to have caffeine anymore (vis-a-vis old age restrictions on my cardiac function) I'll have that option.
Granted, I'm not 18 anymore, but I'm not 40 yet either.