Here in Toronto, which I believe is close to the northern limit for finding termites, they have adapted to form super-colonies too. IIRC they have adapted so the queens need never fly away.
In the eighties a guy named Robert Axelrod ran a tournament. Participants submitted computer programs, that were to interact with one another. The "society" they simulated was very simple. They could use any strategy to play the "prisoner's dilemma".
The program that ended up as the most successful was also the simplest. University of Toronto Game Theorist Anatol Rappaport had submitted a program he called tit for tat. Tit for tat initially cooperated with all the other players. In subsequent turns if the other player it was interacting with had defected last turn, it defected this turn. If the other player had cooperated last turn it cooperated this turn.
Yes, the interactions between people are very complicated, and this game is very simple. Still food for thought though.
Here is the short version: The real police received a bomb threat to the campus. The decision was made to clear the campus. It took hours. There was a lot of confusion, and rumours. About one hundred messages were posted to the local campus newsgroups.
After the incident someone printed them all out for the campus police. One sharp-eyed campus cop saw that one of the messages appeared to be posted prior to the call to 911, and the author of that message became their prime suspect...
Are we agreed that the BBC article does not give enough praise to the teams that designed, built and have run Voyager and those other early probes which have exceeded their planned lifetimes and capabilities?
Last year slashdot interviewed two of the leaders of project gutenberg and Gnupedia. The project Gutenberg guy had a lot interesting things to say about copyright. One thing he said is that librarians tell him that approximately half of the books they buy go out of print within five years.
Is this serving the public good? It seems to me that many copyrights, just like many patents, don't serve the public good at all.
"God helps those who take a big helping for themselves." Firesign Theatre said that in the mid-70s, but it is even more true today. It is the wild west, and the RIAA, and similar outfits are the evil land barons, trying to use "proof by assertion", "I saw it first!", "might makes right", and "Ha ha, I've got deeper pockets than you" to grab the rights to as much of the new intellectual property frontier as they can.
Q3 is the question concerning the length of copyright in the slashdot interview.
Only thirty destinations? Use pneumatic tubes?
on
Hospital Robots
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· Score: 2
The article said that Tobor was programmed for thirty destinations. Thirty destinations? Like that is a lot and we should be impressed? Okay -- proof of concept -- next generation will really knock our socks off -- yadda yadda yadda.
If hospital pharmacies have an ongoing need for a secure delivery system, to deliver drugs, out of the regular schedule, why weren't they built with pneumatic tubes, or something like that?
Pneumatic tubes were a technology introduced, er, um, something like a hundred years ago. When I was a boy scout, thirty years ago, my troop visited a Police Station, and a newspaper, that were still making extensive use of them. Heck, my local Canadian Tire still uses them to send invoices back and forth between the autoservice garage and the cashier.
You have a tubes going to each destination you regularly need to exchange physical objects with. And you have a supply of capsules. You open up a capsule. Put your item in it. Seal it. Insert the capsule in your inlet port, and the capsule gets sucked to your destination. That orange thing is the capsule, and it is probably long enough to roll up a standard sized sheet of paper. Here is a small jpeg of the central switching station of an old-fashioned system. And obviously, the terminals can be secured.
I read a very interesting article a year or two ago, where IIRC, somebody bought up a long dormant company that had owned all the tubes that served the downtown core of city. Tubes served building over a couple of square miles of what was then prime real-estate. And it was still prime real-estate, full of lots of offices wishing to bring in fiber-optics or some other high-speed link to the internet. Some of the tubes of this company had been demolished when the old office buildings were replaced. But lots of heritage office buildings existed. Lots of heritage tubes existed, lying dormant, just waiting for some smart cookie to run fiber through them.
I wondered about this too, when I first read about it fifteen or twenty years ago. (I think it was an article in New Scientist then too.)
Anyhow IANAP (I am not a physicist), but it seemed to me that for the waves to be exactly out of phase when arriving at your ear, the source of the anti-noise should be as close as possible to the noise -- or it should be right at your ear. If the anti-noise generator were 180 degrees from the source of the noise, as you approached or retreated from the noise sources, the two waves would go in and out of phase. The shorter the wavelength the more critical the location of the anti-noise generator.
Bearing in mind IANAP, but it seems to me that this technology would work best with Bass.
...any company could take away consumer's rights by just issuing warnings. What if I opened up a store with a big sign out front stating, "Warning!...
I don't have time right now to cite actual court cases, but it seems to me that consumers have basic rights, and that companies have to have damn good reasons for taking them away.
Isn't that what the Tobacco companies are arguing? Their packs of smokes have warnings on them, so they are not responsible when those who "enjoy" their products get cancer?
Some have suggested that Big Tobacco has had a deep, long term strategy, and that the objections they made to carrying the warnings, a decade or two ago, were just for show. This suggestion is that they anticipated all kinds of lawsuits, and wanted a decade or more of warnings to absolve them of responsibility.
I guess if I really wanted to be honest, I'd send the recording company a check for the value of the album I'd downloaded -- but chances are that they'd then prosecute me for piracy -- even though I had offered to pay anyway.
Why send the recording company a check? They didn't press a CD for you. They didn't spend money on packaging for you. They didn't spend money shipping product to you, or paying for a salesman to smooze your record store. Don't worry about those creeps. They had their big lick at the trough.
Send the artist money. Here is an outfit that does that for you. (I have no association with fairtunes.com, except I saw a link to them here on slashdot a couple of months ago, and thought it was a good idea.)
The artists get what, 5% or 10% or less of the retail price you pay? According to the fairtunes FAQ, the artists typically get all kinds of things, like the cost of producing their CDs charged back against their royalties, so they get
more like 2% of the retail price.
If people don't like Microsoft and their products, why are they in business?
I believe totally and completely in free markets and that the consumer wins in such situations. If you agree with this line of thinking, Microsoft must be doing something correctly in order to stay in business. They must be providing something of significant worth to the consumer otherwise people would fail to purchase their product and thus put them out of business. It's this simple....
Ask any marketing person. I believe, if you can catch them in an honest moment, they will tell you that it is totally unnecessary to provide a product that "provides significant worth", or even one that is any darn good at all, and doesn't harm the consumer. Perception is everything in marketplace. The only thing that is necessary is to convince the consumer you have a superior product.
Now, one approach to convincing the consumer you are offering a superior product is to actually work hard to provide a superior product. Unfortunately, this approach seems to be falling out of favor.
We know how Microsoft convinces consumers their product is superior. FUD. Lies. Buying dishonest "independent" research outfits to prove whatever new lie they want to propogate.
Letting Microsoft get away with lying and cheating will encourage less brazenly dishonest companies think they can get away with this kind of abuse too.
What would we like to see Microsoft do? How can it work with the Open Source community, leverage its resources, and still make a buck?"
I would like to see Microsoft Corporation completely acknowledge, and make full restitution for, their abuse of their customers, and their disrespect for the law.
This is a company, which, when the US DOJ prohibited them from continuing to bundle Internet Exploder as part of their Windows 95 operating system, decided that the simplest way to continue doing business as usual was to rename the next interim bug fix to Windows 95, as Windows 98 -- and pretend it was a brand new operating system, to which the DOJ prohibition did not apply.
We should settle for nothing less than complete acknowledgement and complete restitution. Heads must roll. Microsoft has behaved as if it above the law. Every senior manager, whose actions or statements has proven that they will break the law again should be considered unredeemable. They all have to go. A public trustee should take command of microsoft until ever last weasel is exposed. Those who committed serious crimes should have the evidence against them turned in to the authorities. The big boys should be hit with fines large enough to hurt and humiliate even a multi-billionaire.
And if it is proven that they compounded their offense by repeatedly ignoring previous judgements against them? Hard time, serious hard time. Let's not see the Microsoft conspirator get put in country club jails, like the watergate conspirators.
The CPU isn't the only part that generates heat. Other components do as well. The foam will insulate everything. Sooner or later something will fry.
So, how to put a cooling duct to every component topside that feels hot?
I did some lost wax casting when I was a teenager. In that process you model something out of wax, then cover the model with clay. You fire the clay in a kiln, and the wax burns away. Then you can pour molten metal into the negative space where the clay once was, and when the metal cools, you have a recreation in metal, of the original wax model. But we don't need to do that step here.
Here we only require the negative spaces within the mass of foam.
Well, wax is out. I thought one might use balloons, the long skinny kind. Blow them up, or fill them full of water. Make your network of cooling ducts. Spray on your foam, then burst the balloons.
Bits of balloon stuck to hot chips might smell bad you say? Then get someone you know, who wears them, to save their nylons, when they get runs in them. Put some silly putty, or something else that is very plastic, and put it in the toe of the nylon. Then put the balloon in after it. Tie a knot in the other end of the nylon.
The role of the silly putty is to make firm contact with the chip for which you want to provide a cooling duct. Hopefully, when the foam has set, and you burst the balloon, you can use the nylon to pull out the silly putty and the balloon detritus. What if you can't pull out the nylon without destroying the foam? Then put one nylon inside another when you make your sausage, and only pull out the inner one.
What scorching nylon doesn't smell any better than scorching rubber? Then, when you are setting up your ducts, cut holes in the outer nylon that are just big enough to fit over the chips. The duct that goes over the graphics processor on your video card? Maybe you want to blow that balloon up after you fit it between the cards.
This approach may be even more work, but it has the added benefit of making the whol thing look even more hideous.
If you were really careful you could make your ductwork out of ice.
It's just a Pentium 200 MMX, It shouldn't overheat too bad.
According to this site a Pentium 200 MMX's maximum power is 16 watts. Some of the very hottest 8-) newer CPUs expend quite a bit more. A 2 gigahertz P4 maxs out at 100 watts. Ouch! But 16 watts is still quite a bit.
It's too bad the author didn't take a close up picture of how he arranged the cooling channels.
There is a chain of eateries, here in Southern Ontario, called "Elephant and Castle". They are one of several competing chains that try to recreate the experience of visiting an English pub. The decor is meant to be like that found in England, and so is the menu, Bangers and Mash, Steak and Kidney pie, Fish and Chips.
Well, my buddy Gerry and I sat down and each ordered a pint of cider. There was something funny about those pints. The waitress confirmed that the "pints" were actually only 500 millilitres. We got a kick out of ordering another round of "metric pints".
Who is going to build the first satellite recovery robot/probe? As more satellites are being launched and seem to fail in orbit,and/or die of age. Why not make a recovery vehicle that could park satellites in a low orbit and prepare them for service by a shuttle or robot. Obsolete satellites could be prepared for re-entry.
I guess engery is the only limiting factor...
I should have read this whole thread first. I made the same suggestion. After all, they supplied Mir by robot, and they only crashed one of those robots once.
If energy is a problem, and time is not, could this robot use a light sail? How far are we from that? What prevents using these robot tugs to take satellites out to geo-synchronous orbit in the first place?
Another article in this thread said that NASA wasn't allowed, to carry any liquid fuel rocket in the shuttles, after the Challenger disaster. (Wrong solution to the wrong problem maybe?) So what powers the maneuvering jets of current birds? I read something in another thread recently about "cold-gas jets".
Re:Cost of Repairs vs. Relaunch vs. Reentry
on
NASA Satellite Stranded
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Well, NASA has 3 choices Re-entry, Retrieve and Relauch, or Repair. The first choice, Re-entry, is just to give up on it (in otherwords, send it back into the atmosphere and hope it doens't hit anyone, or hit a target so we get free tacos)...
Maybe, maybe not. From the original BBC story it sounds like those at mission control don't know whether it has enough fuel to make it back to an orbit where the shuttle can retrieve it. I am going to speculate that if they don't have enough fuel to make it back to an orbit where the shuttle can retrieve it, then they don't have enough fuel for re-entry either.
Obviously, Boeing had already started moving it up to geosynchronous orbit, or there wouldn't be any question of moving it back to an orbit where it could be retrieved -- it would still be in an orbit where it could be retrieved. This means it is much less of a problem leaving it in place. Unlike Mir, and Spacelab, if it is partway to geosynchronous, above where the shuttle can retrieve it, its orbit isn't going to decay to an altitude where it might crash for eons.
...Retrieve and Relaunch... would be pretty hard, IMHO, to snatch a sattilite, return it to earth, and relauch it without further damaging it...
How do you figure this? Matching orbits won't be a problem. NASA, and the Russian space agency, must have done this thousands of times by now. Heck, didn't the tugs that supplied Mir do it by remote control? (-8 And they only crashed one once. 8-)
Isn't the robot arm strong enough, yet gentle enough to grab it, once it has matched orbits? Maybe they wouldn't be able to roll the photocells back up. What other problems did you anticipate?
That leaves us with repair, the most reasonable option. Send up some guys on the next shuttle mission with Duct Tape (about $1.50 a roll, depending on store and brand). Voila! Problem solved!
Yeah, we'll send Red Green. (whose movie, "Duct tape forever", opens up any day now. And my buddy who wins stuff won us advance tickets for the local sneak preview.)
Seriously though, my question is, if Boeing has to wait for a next generation shuttle to retrieve it, how many years should they wait, before the satellite last its value? Two years? Five years? Ten years? Whose next generation shuttle will be ready first?
If the Soviets could make robot frieghters dock with Mir, why can't someone make a robot tug just large enough to fly to high orbit satellites like this, and tow them down to where the shuttle can retrieve them?
They could have just wrecked a second ship that happened to contain several hundred cats.
Possibly they didn't introduce cats to eat the rats because they thought the cats might be even more effective at destroying the rare seabirds they wanted to preserve, than the rats were.
Presumably the rats were decimating the sea birds by eating their eggs, where the cats could not only eat the eggs, but eat the birds themselves.
The winters in the early 40's were exceptionally cold, obviously there would have been more ice if the temperature is lower. This only shows that there were less ice during their recent journey, nothing more. Making blanket statements based on 2 observations is not good science.;-)
Floating ice persists for decades. It persists long enough that the salt is squeezed out of it, and it goes fresh. Experience can tell you how many decades old the ice is, and how fresh it is, from the change in colours it transmits. Old ice appears blue.
The disappearance of ice from the passage is not a short-term, passing event. It is a deeply significant event. Larsen was a very experienced Arctic navigator. He commanded the St. Roch for almost twenty years. The ice conditions he encountered during the 1942-1944 passage were typical conditions of that period -- and hundreds of years prior.
Prior to her launch the RCMP, which provided the only Federal presence in Canada's north, used chartered vessels to supply far northern outposts, during the brief Arctic summer. The St Roch was purpose built for Arctic missions. Her hull was dish-shaped, and specially reinforced, so that rather than being crushed when frozen in, she would pop out of the encroaching ice, like a cork. Her hull was clad with an outer layer of some kind of Australian gumwood. The planks were about 6 cm thick, about 20 cm wide, with a gap of 1 cm between each plank. I can't remember the explanation, but this unusual construction detail was another adaptation to sailing in the Arctic.
I visited the Vancouver Maritime Museum, where the St Roch is on display, a couple of times. And I bought the companion book. It has very dramatic photos of showing the dangers of sailing in those waters. One photo shows a Hudson's Bay Company vessel being burst by the pressure of pack ice, a few hundred metres away from the St Roch.
Here is another biographical link to Henry Larsen.
Why am I going on is such detail about Larsen and the St Roch? Because those apologists who take every piece of evidence for global warming and dismiss it as a statistical anomaly, or just another harmless turn in a cycle we don't understand, really piss me off.
These are not statistical anomalies.
Yes, our planet's climate is a very complicated system. We aren't anywhere near to understanding it, or the full role human's play in changing it. But, even if some or all of the very clear evidence we are receiving of global warming are natural phenomenon, not caused by a side effect of our technological society, I can not agree to see them as harmless.
I am guessing that the Larsen this shelf is named after was the Captain of the St Roch, the second vessel to traverse the NW passage, and the first to do so from West to East. Here is a link and another one.
The St Roch, commanded by Sergeant Larsen, needed 28 months
to complete its first traverse of the NW passage, during WW2. (Basically defending the Canadian Arctic from our insensitive American allies.) The recreation of its voyage, in 2000, encountered clear sailing in waters that had been choked with ice sixty years earlier, providing very clear evidence of global warming.
no image processing program in the world could put together bits from a picture of a CD surface.
Why not? All you have to do is identify the edges of the pits and record the distance between them. Apply
the CD decoding standard to the results and out comes the data.
There is a Monty Python skit were the Pythons mock science shows aimed at kids -- were Cleese teaches kids how to play the flute.
"Right. This is a flute. You hold it like
this, blow in this end, and move your fingers up and down.
I don't know how to play the flute. But I know enough to know Cleese's description was insufficient. I don't know a whole lot about the "decoding standards" CDROMs. But I know a few things that make me skeptical about your suggestions.
So let me ask you a few questions:
How large a shard is required before one can tell which direction the pits progress?
Data is stored on audio CDs and data CDROMs in one long circular track. With audio CDs it is not important if some bits are read or stored incorrectly. With data CDROMs it is important. Important enough that each 2048 byte data block has an additional overhead of more than 10% stored, to provide error correction. I am going to suggest that a shard has to contain at least one whole 23xx byte data block before it makes sense to try to read it. So, how long, what is the physical length, of an arc that can store one data block?
Note: Each arc of that one long circular track is going to have a slightly different curvature. This would complicate reading them, but it might help determine how closely related blocks were.
How much of the data on a CDROM would have to be recoverable before you could make sense of it? 2048 bytes? It is enough to hold a page or so of text -- if you are lucky. More likely it will start in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a paragraph, and end in the middle of a sentence a paragraph or three later. You won't know who wrote it. You won't be able to prove that the rest of the document didn't point out why that approach wouldn't work.
What if the block you can read completely is binary data of some kind? If it is part of an archive, like a.zip file, I think it is unrecoverable. It could be a couple of consecutive cells in a spreadsheet. "Well boss, do the numbers '$421,000.00', '$5,679.00' and '$666.00' suggest anything to you?"
In short, I am skeptical of the utility of trying to read the shards.
Thanks. I did a google search on Erobson, but didn't come up with anything. I did a google search on "BFE University" and got all kinds of funny false leads. I really would like to know more about this guy and his telescope, if you care to elaborate.
I know this is getting off-topic. I would have sent it to Sarcasm_Orgasm directly, but didn't see an email address.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in Toronto, which I believe is close to the northern limit for finding termites, they have adapted to form super-colonies too. IIRC they have
adapted so the queens need never fly away.
They also get a much smaller proportion of trolls, "first post", goatse.x...
Mod this up someone. I was going to make point number three myself. All three of these are excellent points... N
The program that ended up as the most successful was also the simplest. University of Toronto Game Theorist Anatol Rappaport had submitted a program he called tit for tat. Tit for tat initially cooperated with all the other players. In subsequent turns if the other player it was interacting with had defected last turn, it defected this turn. If the other player had cooperated last turn it cooperated this turn.
Yes, the interactions between people are very complicated, and this game is very simple. Still food for thought though.
And are there any who know anything about computers? Maybe nowadays there are. Here is a horror story about campus cops and computers from 1990. Risks of posting warnings with the wrong time or date.
Here is the short version: The real police received a bomb threat to the campus. The decision was made to clear the campus. It took hours. There was a lot of confusion, and rumours. About one hundred messages were posted to the local campus newsgroups.
After the incident someone printed them all out for the campus police. One sharp-eyed campus cop saw that one of the messages appeared to be posted prior to the call to 911, and the author of that message became their prime suspect...
Are we agreed that the BBC article does not give enough praise to the teams that designed, built and have run Voyager and those other early probes which have exceeded their planned lifetimes and capabilities?
Is this serving the public good? It seems to me that many copyrights, just like many patents, don't serve the public good at all.
"God helps those who take a big helping for themselves." Firesign Theatre said that in the mid-70s, but it is even more true today. It is the wild west, and the RIAA, and similar outfits are the evil land barons, trying to use "proof by assertion", "I saw it first!", "might makes right", and "Ha ha, I've got deeper pockets than you" to grab the rights to as much of the new intellectual property frontier as they can.
Q3 is the question concerning the length of copyright in the slashdot interview.
If hospital pharmacies have an ongoing need for a secure delivery system, to deliver drugs, out of the regular schedule, why weren't they built with pneumatic tubes, or something like that?
Pneumatic tubes were a technology introduced, er, um, something like a hundred years ago. When I was a boy scout, thirty years ago, my troop visited a Police Station, and a newspaper, that were still making extensive use of them. Heck, my local Canadian Tire still uses them to send invoices back and forth between the autoservice garage and the cashier.
You have a tubes going to each destination you regularly need to exchange physical objects with. And you have a supply of capsules. You open up a capsule. Put your item in it. Seal it. Insert the capsule in your inlet port, and the capsule gets sucked to your destination. That orange thing is the capsule, and it is probably long enough to roll up a standard sized sheet of paper. Here is a small jpeg of the central switching station of an old-fashioned system. And obviously, the terminals can be secured.
I read a very interesting article a year or two ago, where IIRC, somebody bought up a long dormant company that had owned all the tubes that served the downtown core of city. Tubes served building over a couple of square miles of what was then prime real-estate. And it was still prime real-estate, full of lots of offices wishing to bring in fiber-optics or some other high-speed link to the internet. Some of the tubes of this company had been demolished when the old office buildings were replaced. But lots of heritage office buildings existed. Lots of heritage tubes existed, lying dormant, just waiting for some smart cookie to run fiber through them.
I wondered about this too, when I first read about it fifteen or twenty years ago. (I think it was an article in New Scientist then too.)
Anyhow IANAP (I am not a physicist), but it seemed to me that for the waves to be exactly out of phase when arriving at your ear, the source of the anti-noise should be as close as possible to the noise -- or it should be right at your ear. If the anti-noise generator were 180 degrees from the source of the noise, as you approached or retreated from the noise sources, the two waves would go in and out of phase. The shorter the wavelength the more critical the location of the anti-noise generator.
Bearing in mind IANAP, but it seems to me that this technology would work best with Bass.
Isn't that what the Tobacco companies are arguing? Their packs of smokes have warnings on them, so they are not responsible when those who "enjoy" their products get cancer?
Some have suggested that Big Tobacco has had a deep, long term strategy, and that the objections they made to carrying the warnings, a decade or two ago, were just for show. This suggestion is that they anticipated all kinds of lawsuits, and wanted a decade or more of warnings to absolve them of responsibility.
Why send the recording company a check? They didn't press a CD for you. They didn't spend money on packaging for you. They didn't spend money shipping product to you, or paying for a salesman to smooze your record store. Don't worry about those creeps. They had their big lick at the trough.
Send the artist money. Here is an outfit that does that for you. (I have no association with fairtunes.com, except I saw a link to them here on slashdot a couple of months ago, and thought it was a good idea.)
The artists get what, 5% or 10% or less of the retail price you pay? According to the fairtunes FAQ, the artists typically get all kinds of things, like the cost of producing their CDs charged back against their royalties, so they get more like 2% of the retail price.
Ask any marketing person. I believe, if you can catch them in an honest moment, they will tell you that it is totally unnecessary to provide a product that "provides significant worth", or even one that is any darn good at all, and doesn't harm the consumer. Perception is everything in marketplace. The only thing that is necessary is to convince the consumer you have a superior product.
Now, one approach to convincing the consumer you are offering a superior product is to actually work hard to provide a superior product. Unfortunately, this approach seems to be falling out of favor.
We know how Microsoft convinces consumers their product is superior. FUD. Lies. Buying dishonest "independent" research outfits to prove whatever new lie they want to propogate.
Letting Microsoft get away with lying and cheating will encourage less brazenly dishonest companies think they can get away with this kind of abuse too.
I would like to see Microsoft Corporation completely acknowledge, and make full restitution for, their abuse of their customers, and their disrespect for the law.
This is a company, which, when the US DOJ prohibited them from continuing to bundle Internet Exploder as part of their Windows 95 operating system, decided that the simplest way to continue doing business as usual was to rename the next interim bug fix to Windows 95, as Windows 98 -- and pretend it was a brand new operating system, to which the DOJ prohibition did not apply.
We should settle for nothing less than complete acknowledgement and complete restitution. Heads must roll. Microsoft has behaved as if it above the law. Every senior manager, whose actions or statements has proven that they will break the law again should be considered unredeemable. They all have to go. A public trustee should take command of microsoft until ever last weasel is exposed. Those who committed serious crimes should have the evidence against them turned in to the authorities. The big boys should be hit with fines large enough to hurt and humiliate even a multi-billionaire.
And if it is proven that they compounded their offense by repeatedly ignoring previous judgements against them? Hard time, serious hard time. Let's not see the Microsoft conspirator get put in country club jails, like the watergate conspirators.
Did you hear about the guy with five peni?
His undershorts fit him like a glove.
So, how to put a cooling duct to every component topside that feels hot?
I did some lost wax casting when I was a teenager. In that process you model something out of wax, then cover the model with clay. You fire the clay in a kiln, and the wax burns away. Then you can pour molten metal into the negative space where the clay once was, and when the metal cools, you have a recreation in metal, of the original wax model. But we don't need to do that step here.
Here we only require the negative spaces within the mass of foam.
Well, wax is out. I thought one might use balloons, the long skinny kind. Blow them up, or fill them full of water. Make your network of cooling ducts. Spray on your foam, then burst the balloons.
Bits of balloon stuck to hot chips might smell bad you say? Then get someone you know, who wears them, to save their nylons, when they get runs in them. Put some silly putty, or something else that is very plastic, and put it in the toe of the nylon. Then put the balloon in after it. Tie a knot in the other end of the nylon.
The role of the silly putty is to make firm contact with the chip for which you want to provide a cooling duct. Hopefully, when the foam has set, and you burst the balloon, you can use the nylon to pull out the silly putty and the balloon detritus. What if you can't pull out the nylon without destroying the foam? Then put one nylon inside another when you make your sausage, and only pull out the inner one.
What scorching nylon doesn't smell any better than scorching rubber? Then, when you are setting up your ducts, cut holes in the outer nylon that are just big enough to fit over the chips. The duct that goes over the graphics processor on your video card? Maybe you want to blow that balloon up after you fit it between the cards.
This approach may be even more work, but it has the added benefit of making the whol thing look even more hideous.
If you were really careful you could make your ductwork out of ice.
According to this site a Pentium 200 MMX's maximum power is 16 watts. Some of the very hottest 8-) newer CPUs expend quite a bit more. A 2 gigahertz P4 maxs out at 100 watts. Ouch! But 16 watts is still quite a bit.
It's too bad the author didn't take a close up picture of how he arranged the cooling channels.
I think someone needs to review the moderator guidelines. Why should this be marked "offtopic"?
Well, my buddy Gerry and I sat down and each ordered a pint of cider. There was something funny about those pints. The waitress confirmed that the "pints" were actually only 500 millilitres. We got a kick out of ordering another round of "metric pints".
If energy is a problem, and time is not, could this robot use a light sail? How far are we from that? What prevents using these robot tugs to take satellites out to geo-synchronous orbit in the first place?
Another article in this thread said that NASA wasn't allowed, to carry any liquid fuel rocket in the shuttles, after the Challenger disaster. (Wrong solution to the wrong problem maybe?) So what powers the maneuvering jets of current birds? I read something in another thread recently about "cold-gas jets".
Maybe, maybe not. From the original BBC story it sounds like those at mission control don't know whether it has enough fuel to make it back to an orbit where the shuttle can retrieve it. I am going to speculate that if they don't have enough fuel to make it back to an orbit where the shuttle can retrieve it, then they don't have enough fuel for re-entry either.
Obviously, Boeing had already started moving it up to geosynchronous orbit, or there wouldn't be any question of moving it back to an orbit where it could be retrieved -- it would still be in an orbit where it could be retrieved. This means it is much less of a problem leaving it in place. Unlike Mir, and Spacelab, if it is partway to geosynchronous, above where the shuttle can retrieve it, its orbit isn't going to decay to an altitude where it might crash for eons.
How do you figure this? Matching orbits won't be a problem. NASA, and the Russian space agency, must have done this thousands of times by now. Heck, didn't the tugs that supplied Mir do it by remote control? (-8 And they only crashed one once. 8-)
Isn't the robot arm strong enough, yet gentle enough to grab it, once it has matched orbits? Maybe they wouldn't be able to roll the photocells back up. What other problems did you anticipate?
Yeah, we'll send Red Green. (whose movie, "Duct tape forever", opens up any day now. And my buddy who wins stuff won us advance tickets for the local sneak preview.)
Seriously though, my question is, if Boeing has to wait for a next generation shuttle to retrieve it, how many years should they wait, before the satellite last its value? Two years? Five years? Ten years? Whose next generation shuttle will be ready first?
If the Soviets could make robot frieghters dock with Mir, why can't someone make a robot tug just large enough to fly to high orbit satellites like this, and tow them down to where the shuttle can retrieve them?
Possibly they didn't introduce cats to eat the rats because they thought the cats might be even more effective at destroying the rare seabirds they wanted to preserve, than the rats were.
Presumably the rats were decimating the sea birds by eating their eggs, where the cats could not only eat the eggs, but eat the birds themselves.
Floating ice persists for decades. It persists long enough that the salt is squeezed out of it, and it goes fresh. Experience can tell you how many decades old the ice is, and how fresh it is, from the change in colours it transmits. Old ice appears blue.
The disappearance of ice from the passage is not a short-term, passing event. It is a deeply significant event. Larsen was a very experienced Arctic navigator. He commanded the St. Roch for almost twenty years. The ice conditions he encountered during the 1942-1944 passage were typical conditions of that period -- and hundreds of years prior.
Prior to her launch the RCMP, which provided the only Federal presence in Canada's north, used chartered vessels to supply far northern outposts, during the brief Arctic summer. The St Roch was purpose built for Arctic missions. Her hull was dish-shaped, and specially reinforced, so that rather than being crushed when frozen in, she would pop out of the encroaching ice, like a cork. Her hull was clad with an outer layer of some kind of Australian gumwood. The planks were about 6 cm thick, about 20 cm wide, with a gap of 1 cm between each plank. I can't remember the explanation, but this unusual construction detail was another adaptation to sailing in the Arctic.
I visited the Vancouver Maritime Museum, where the St Roch is on display, a couple of times. And I bought the companion book. It has very dramatic photos of showing the dangers of sailing in those waters. One photo shows a Hudson's Bay Company vessel being burst by the pressure of pack ice, a few hundred metres away from the St Roch.
Here is another biographical link to Henry Larsen.
Why am I going on is such detail about Larsen and the St Roch? Because those apologists who take every piece of evidence for global warming and dismiss it as a statistical anomaly, or just another harmless turn in a cycle we don't understand, really piss me off.
These are not statistical anomalies.
Yes, our planet's climate is a very complicated system. We aren't anywhere near to understanding it, or the full role human's play in changing it. But, even if some or all of the very clear evidence we are receiving of global warming are natural phenomenon, not caused by a side effect of our technological society, I can not agree to see them as harmless.
The St Roch, commanded by Sergeant Larsen, needed 28 months to complete its first traverse of the NW passage, during WW2. (Basically defending the Canadian Arctic from our insensitive American allies.) The recreation of its voyage, in 2000, encountered clear sailing in waters that had been choked with ice sixty years earlier, providing very clear evidence of global warming.
There is a Monty Python skit were the Pythons mock science shows aimed at kids -- were Cleese teaches kids how to play the flute.
I don't know how to play the flute. But I know enough to know Cleese's description was insufficient. I don't know a whole lot about the "decoding standards" CDROMs. But I know a few things that make me skeptical about your suggestions.
So let me ask you a few questions:
How large a shard is required before one can tell which direction the pits progress?
Data is stored on audio CDs and data CDROMs in one long circular track. With audio CDs it is not important if some bits are read or stored incorrectly. With data CDROMs it is important. Important enough that each 2048 byte data block has an additional overhead of more than 10% stored, to provide error correction. I am going to suggest that a shard has to contain at least one whole 23xx byte data block before it makes sense to try to read it. So, how long, what is the physical length, of an arc that can store one data block?
Note: Each arc of that one long circular track is going to have a slightly different curvature. This would complicate reading them, but it might help determine how closely related blocks were.
How much of the data on a CDROM would have to be recoverable before you could make sense of it? 2048 bytes? It is enough to hold a page or so of text -- if you are lucky. More likely it will start in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a paragraph, and end in the middle of a sentence a paragraph or three later. You won't know who wrote it. You won't be able to prove that the rest of the document didn't point out why that approach wouldn't work.
What if the block you can read completely is binary data of some kind? If it is part of an archive, like a .zip file, I think it is unrecoverable. It could be a couple of consecutive cells in a spreadsheet. "Well boss, do the numbers '$421,000.00', '$5,679.00' and '$666.00' suggest anything to you?"
In short, I am skeptical of the utility of trying to read the shards.
I know this is getting off-topic. I would have sent it to Sarcasm_Orgasm directly, but didn't see an email address.