If you want people to understand you, you have to make an effort to be understood.
It's a pity such an insightful comment is buried under a very large amount of arrogance. Actually, now I think about it, all of the arrogant responses to this story just underline this entire thread and further enfore the "geek = self-righteous dweeb who thinks they're better than the general public stereotype".
but those people aren't the ones we're talking about. The people we're talking about are the ones who are truly anti-social and will continue to exclude themselves from social contact at the LAN parties, nevertheless they will still use it as justification for fulfilling some sort of quota for going out and having human contact.
These were exactly the people I was talking about (thanks for wording it better!). It is these people who are the "worry".
It's not that LAN parties are anti-social but if your an anti-social person it's easier to be anti-social at a LAN party then at another type of gathering just because the computer is right there as an objective waiting to be played and you can ignore the people around you thinking that their mere physical proximity.means you're being social.
I would argue that it is the internet (or network in the case of a LAN party) that makes it easy to be anti-social. Let's face it, the internet is pretty much at the stage where you could concievably lead your life without ever interacting with the real world (including people). There is no other hobby or past-time that I can think of that allows you to live outside of the real world to such a great extent.
People can argue until they are blue in the face, but I think this is a bad thing.
Everyone needs to know a minimal set of vocabulary to purchase and operate anything.
To operate, probably some, but to purchase - no, joe public shouldn't have to know jargon. Or if they do, then it should be possible to explain it in non-jargon terms. Jargon is one of the tools that slimy sales people use to push expensive products on consumers that they don't need.
This is not directed specifically at the parent comment, but many of the posts here display the exact attitude that gives joe public the idea that the average computer geek is a stuck up dweeb who thinks he's superior to them because he knows more and refuses to try and explain it to them in their terms because "they're too stupid to understand anyway".
just as a consumer should know what horsepower is when buying an automobile
come off it - nobody NEEDS to know what a horsepower is to buy a car. The major autombile buyers are mum and dad, and I'm willing to bet that very few of them even look at the horsepower figure when buying a car, let alone know what it is. The vast majority of cars handle perfectly well and have enough power for the average buyer.
You can be the best engineer in the world but unless you are able to communicate your ideas [to a non-engineer], be it in writing or voice, you are of no use to anyone. Without fail, a complete lack of communication ability is near the top of the compalints list for companies interviewed about the skillsets of newly graduated engineers (my experience is with mechanical engineers).
... occasional gamers. They arent obsessed with them and associate with "normal" people...
Those people are not what I call a "gamer" - they just happen to enjoy spending some time playing computer games, but computer games are not the dominant activity in their lives.
The problem is when you become addicted and sit in front of your computer all day.
I'm not sure if that alone is the problem - to me it's more the people who do this to the exclusion of going out and seeing people (non-gamers!) face-to-face in the real world (and I don't mean at LAN parties). I suppose it's like anything that has the potential to be addictive.
The real difference (and danger I guess) is that it is entirely possible to create another world and not have to interact with anyone through gaming, effectively withdrawing themselves from society - most other activities don't have this "potential".
Finite element models with large numbers of degrees of freedom (more degrees of freedom => greater accuracy and also more computation time, so it's always a matter of juggling the two) can take up massive amounts of memory and the output files can easily get to the point where they're consuming >10GB of hard drive space for a single model (ie. you can't use it on a system with the 2GB file size limit).
Also stuff like CFD (computational fluyid dynamics - the type of thing used to design Formula 1 cars and turbine blades) can really eat away at memory.
The high-end CAE/CAD/CAM programs like Unigraphics, IDEAS, MSC (Nastran, Patran etc), Pro/Engineer can use a lot of memory when the model gets really complex and you wnat to manipulate. Basically these programs will use as much memory as you canb give them.
Admittedly these are not particularly common applications (like office).
Re:Reputations of people, specifically teachers
on
NYT On Online Reputations
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I haven't checked out the site, but anyone who chooses their university on the basis of opinions posted on a website deserves everything they get. For something as serious as this ("grading" teachers), the internet is simply too anonymous to be taken on it's merits. For example, who's to say that the teacher/prof themself is not posting opinions? Or somebody with a bone to pick doesn't post lots of bad opinions? What sort of cross-checks are there that the person posting the opinion has ever been taught by that prof? etc etc
It also encourages teachers to teach in the manner that influences their grading (ever see the episode of Malcolm in the Middle where the new teacher institutes a ranking table?), just as exaqms encourage students to memorise what's required to pass a unit rather than learn the material so they know and understand it. But I'll get off my soapbox as I'm starting to go off on a bit of a tangent.:)
And, as is the case with almost every survey that wants opinions, negative opinions will far outweight the positive simply because people rarely bother to comment when the job is well done.
Or is this just another way to force an upgrade cycle?
It may well be one of the intentions of it, but one thing I don't get is that with CPU speeds and hard disk capacities where they are now, the average computer buyer (which probably is not very well represented on slashdot) no longer really needs to upgrade their computer, so changing interface/slot shape/etc won't really matter to them.
I know I'm generalising, but the only applications that really push today's computers are games (and high end scientific programs, but they're a fairly minor special case) and I would guess that most computers are not used primarily for games (ie. "serious gamers" - think families). Serious gamers will always be upgrading their computer to the latest and greatest anyway - they don't need to be forced into an upgrade cycle.
It's getting to the point now where by the time the average family decides they need to upgrade their computer, it is easier (and maybe even cheaper) to just buy the latest middle-of-the-line computer package.
I'd almost question whether the idea whole idea of upgrading is itself becoming obsolete for an average computer user?
then it would most likely be another limited single-goal effort like Apollo.
No, this sort of effort will never happen again, for one very simple reason - it was absolutely staggeringly expensive (at the time). Most people point at Apollo and say how much was achieved (which I'm not disputing), but few people realise just how much money was spent to put a man on the moon. I remember reading (sorry, no ref) that at the height of the Apollo program (which lasted for quite a few years), it was costing about 50 cents (1960 currency remember) per day for every single man, woman and child in the US. Stop and think about that figure for a second - it's mind-blowingly huge.
Because they have a role to play, alongside unmanned space missions. Humans are adaptable, intelligent, resourceful and capable of coping with the unexpected, among various other qualities that a robot/probe will never be able to match. True, they require more maintenance (food, air, etc), but that's why both options are needed. Use the right tool for the job, not the cheapest - that's how accidents happen.
but you are risking human lives
risk is relative - every time you cross a road you take a bigger risk than flying into space but you still do it. You have accepted the risk (or you have no choice, butyou get my point) and so have the astronauts. They don't need a feel-good bleeding-heart social worker worrying standing up for them - let them do the job they want to do and let them worry about the risks.
and huge negative publicity. And that negative publicity has a bigger effect than anything positive.
That's a very good point, but I argue that you don't not do something simply because somebody (who most likely is not aware of the facts but is speculating, or more likely, just making something up) says it's bad. Of course, the negative publicity is what Joe Public believes and that's the problem. Bad news will always get more press; I'm not sure you can really do anything about it.
OK, a really bad thing happened, but let's learn from it and move on to bigger and better things. I really feel that launching the shuttle again is, symbollically if nothing else, a positive sign that NASA won't abandon manned space missions, something that seemed to be on the cards after the Columbia disaster.
Space exploration (or just working in space) is dangerous - it always has been and (for the forseeable future at least) always will be. There will always be setbacks and it's an expensive 'business', but exploration and curiosity is one of the things that makes us human (see my sig).
that's not what the average internet user does with their bandwidth.
and have been in several Beta Programs for AC2, Eve-online, Chrome, SWG and a few others.
you're now in an even smaller minority.
SWG was a 2gig download!!! There goes my cap for the next month!!
It's not the ISP's problem if SWG is a 2GB download - surely the company could mail it on CD? Remember, you chose to participate in these beta programs that required downloading all these files (and spending most of your time online using up your bandwidth). In any case, you only d/load it once, not every single month.
It's like having a credit card - if you happen to have a big payment one month, you adjust your spending accordingly to cope with it the best you can. If you still want to use your credit card when you know you won't be able to pay it back, then that's your choice; don't blame the bank (unless they offer your 6 year old daughter a credit card - then you can blame the bank!).
My point is that you are not a typical internet user - you are in the (vast) minority and you possibly cost the ISP more money than it is worth to even provide you a service, so you get screwed.
actually, considering that Telstra is still majority owned by the govt (taxpayer), it's hardly surprising that the decisions it makes are not in the best interests of it's shareholders and that the share price has suffered accordingly. It may (does) have a monopoly, but Telstra's ability to exploit that for profit is hamstrung by the fact that it is not really a private (sherholder-owned) corporation, but a govt-owned company which happens to have a lot of private shareholders.
Because Telstra's pricing model probably (rightly) assumes that the average person who used broadband for email, web, the odd online game, etc won't use up their 3GB allocation, so they [Telstra] may well be undercharging for the first 3GB (yes, I'm [educated] guessing), or at least not making much profit at all (probably more likely). I imagine it's a pretty common pricing model - make a tiny profit on a huge number of sales and you make lots of money.
On the other hand, the internet junkies who have programs harvesting mp3s/warez 24/7 for the whole month, while online gaming every single night, etc, etc are the exception to the pricing model, whether they like it or not. This costs the ISP a lot of money (esp when the data has to travel most of the way round the world, in the case of Australia) and the costs will be passed on. Slashdot likely has a disproportianate representation of this group, and the views of it's posters reflects this (IMO).
I think people forget the geographic isolation of Australia from the major internet nodes (eg. US, Europe, Japan/China) - laying cable to even get access to the internet is bloody expensive.
Very interesting comparison, but I think one of the big differences with Oz is how isolated it is from the rest of the world. Canada is next door to the US, which you could arguably call the backbone of the internet. Australia isn't (geographically) close to either US, Europe, or even Japan/China. That makes laying cable, etc *very* expensive, and my guess would be that limits the sheer bandwidth that Aus, as a country, has to the rest of the internet.
The problem Aus has with Telstra is that the govt has privatised part of it (49% I think), so while it is pretending to be a private corporation, it is still majority owned by the state. As a result, it's not clear who (shareholders/citizens) it should be working for. Telstra has a monopoly in it's sector that can well be compared with Microsoft, yet it never seems to do anywhere near as well because it is hampered by having to do please the government and the shareholders, which IMO is frankly not possible.
but "The Matrix" has a good chance at being "The New Star Wars".
Interesting, I've never thought about that before. I would have agreed that The Matrix could have become the new SW, but after seeing Reloaded, it just wasn't good enough for the whole series to become a cult. Don't get me wrong - I really enjoyed Reloaded but if you look at Empire Strikes Back, it was (IMO) much better than SW and that was what made the whole series so good. I can't think of many series since where the sequel surpasses the original.
sorry, but you're wrong. Hydrogen bonds are a special form of van der Waals 'bonding' which happen to be much, much stronger (as the original poster pointed out) and so they get a special name. A hydrogen bond is usually considered to be when a hydrogen atom is bonded to either N (itrogen), O (xygen) or F (luorine). F is a bit of a special case since it is so electronegative that it forms a much stronger polarisation than either O or N and it forms very, very reactcive bonds - it's why hydrofluoric acid (HF) is so dangerous.
H-bonds do not bond H to H, they cause a (part of) a bond to become polarised (the electrons are effectively dragged away from the H atom), creating a very strong van der Waals force.
Van der Waals force works between any two reasonably flat surfaces
van der Waals forces work between [bonded] atoms. A surface just has a larger area so you get more bonds in "action", hence a larger force of adhesion.
and any surface is flat on a small enough scale, which is what this tape is exploiting.
no, completely wrong - the smaller the scale, the rougher the surface. That's why surface roughness (Ra, Rs, cla) measurements are all standardised to a certain length.
The gecko exploits the fact that it has a high surface contact area to mass ratio (look at the size of the pads on the feet to it's body size).
who in turn picked it up from Nature Materials, where the full article is soon to be published. The abstract is here (advance online publication) and if you've got a subscription to Nature Materials you can get the full article from there.
yep, plenty of times. Succeeded quite spectacularly (in getting very drunk) most of the time too.
Now the real problem with a night's boozing on the black stuff shows itself the next day... and I don't mean the hangover (which, strangely, I don't seem to get from guinness)!
great suggestion. Here's some of my favourites, fiction & non-fiction. You'll probably spot some themes:)
NON-FICTION: * Joe Simpson - Touching the Void ("Dark Shadows Falling" is good too, but "Touching the Void" is the one you won't be able to put down) * Jon Krakauer - Into Thin Air (you should probably also read Anatoli Boukreev's "The Climb" for his account of the Everest tragedy, though it's nowhere near as good a book as Krakauer's) * Nick Hornby - Fever Pitch (for all sports fans) * Steven Vogel - Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People * Simon Winchester - The Map That Changed the World * David Attenborough - Life On Air (biography)
FICTION: * George RR Martin - A Song of Ice and Fire series * Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars (the rest of the trilogy is also good, but nowhere near as good as the first book IMO) * Matthew Reilly - Ice Station (I challenge anyone to put this down once the action starts) * Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front (should be required reading for everyone) * Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich * Stephen King - Christine * Robert Ludlum - The Bourne Identity (please don't judge this on the movie - the book is on another level) * John Fowles - The Collector * Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series
there's lots more, but hopefully there's some decent ideas for someone there.
well, the specsheets on the website list the modulus (assume they are talking tensile, not bulk/shear/compressive) as 62-79GPA (spectra 900), 98-113GPa (1000) and 113-124GPa (2000) which are the numbers I used.
I never said it wasn't impressive material; it certainly is, especially when you consider the basic material, UHMWPE, has a modulus of about 40MPa.
I mean, I can't imagine that if cost wasn't a consideration, any place where you wouldn't want a lighter material vs. the heavier one.
See that's just the problem. It's great in theory, but in a real-world problem there is almost never a point where cost is not a consideration. In fact, in many everyday, mundane design situations, it is the primary consideration.
There's some far sexier materials out there though (not really mass-produced) - some of the nano-stuff that's being played with is really interesting (but completely impractical!), metallic foams and some biological materials are turning out to have some pretty impressive (and unique) combinations of material properties. Shape-memory alloys are also pretty neat.
As an engineer I get fed up with people claiming product X is stronger than steel, etc, etc. You almost always (as in the case of spectra) find that what they are talking about is specific strength, which measures mechanical strength per unit weight. It doesn't mean it's stronger than steel. The modulus of steel (el cheapo low carbon) is roughly 200GPa, spectra is 60-124 or less than half as strong.
the tensile strength of 3GPa is the UTS - ultimate tensile strength. UTS is where the material catastrophically, and unrecoverably, fails. The material will have yielded (and possibly weakened) well before this stress level is reached.
Steel will almost always be the basic material of choice, except when weight is important, for the simple reasons that it is strong, easy to work with, easy to manufacture into almost anything and, most importantly, cheap.
okay. end my own rant:)
Re:Or, even better ...
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 3, Informative
the rounding is only on the final payment at the till, not on individual items. And it's only for cash transactions, not electronic transactions. Sometimes it rounds in your favour, sometimes in the store's favour, but it evens out in the end. Yes, it can be manipulated to save you a cent or two here and there, but anyone doing that should probably worry about getting a life first.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want people to understand you, you have to make an effort to be understood.
It's a pity such an insightful comment is buried under a very large amount of arrogance. Actually, now I think about it, all of the arrogant responses to this story just underline this entire thread and further enfore the "geek = self-righteous dweeb who thinks they're better than the general public stereotype".
but those people aren't the ones we're talking about. The people we're talking about are the ones who are truly anti-social and will continue to exclude themselves from social contact at the LAN parties, nevertheless they will still use it as justification for fulfilling some sort of quota for going out and having human contact.
These were exactly the people I was talking about (thanks for wording it better!). It is these people who are the "worry".
It's not that LAN parties are anti-social but if your an anti-social person it's easier to be anti-social at a LAN party then at another type of gathering just because the computer is right there as an objective waiting to be played and you can ignore the people around you thinking that their mere physical proximity.means you're being social.
I would argue that it is the internet (or network in the case of a LAN party) that makes it easy to be anti-social. Let's face it, the internet is pretty much at the stage where you could concievably lead your life without ever interacting with the real world (including people). There is no other hobby or past-time that I can think of that allows you to live outside of the real world to such a great extent.
People can argue until they are blue in the face, but I think this is a bad thing.
Everyone needs to know a minimal set of vocabulary to purchase and operate anything.
To operate, probably some, but to purchase - no, joe public shouldn't have to know jargon. Or if they do, then it should be possible to explain it in non-jargon terms. Jargon is one of the tools that slimy sales people use to push expensive products on consumers that they don't need.
This is not directed specifically at the parent comment, but many of the posts here display the exact attitude that gives joe public the idea that the average computer geek is a stuck up dweeb who thinks he's superior to them because he knows more and refuses to try and explain it to them in their terms because "they're too stupid to understand anyway".
just as a consumer should know what horsepower is when buying an automobile
come off it - nobody NEEDS to know what a horsepower is to buy a car. The major autombile buyers are mum and dad, and I'm willing to bet that very few of them even look at the horsepower figure when buying a car, let alone know what it is. The vast majority of cars handle perfectly well and have enough power for the average buyer.
You can be the best engineer in the world but unless you are able to communicate your ideas [to a non-engineer], be it in writing or voice, you are of no use to anyone. Without fail, a complete lack of communication ability is near the top of the compalints list for companies interviewed about the skillsets of newly graduated engineers (my experience is with mechanical engineers).
Those people are not what I call a "gamer" - they just happen to enjoy spending some time playing computer games, but computer games are not the dominant activity in their lives.
The problem is when you become addicted and sit in front of your computer all day.
I'm not sure if that alone is the problem - to me it's more the people who do this to the exclusion of going out and seeing people (non-gamers!) face-to-face in the real world (and I don't mean at LAN parties). I suppose it's like anything that has the potential to be addictive.
The real difference (and danger I guess) is that it is entirely possible to create another world and not have to interact with anyone through gaming, effectively withdrawing themselves from society - most other activities don't have this "potential".
hmmmm
I don't run benchmark software very often. =)
;)
I'm guessing you're obviously not a l33t hardcore gamer then ?
Finite element models with large numbers of degrees of freedom (more degrees of freedom => greater accuracy and also more computation time, so it's always a matter of juggling the two) can take up massive amounts of memory and the output files can easily get to the point where they're consuming >10GB of hard drive space for a single model (ie. you can't use it on a system with the 2GB file size limit).
Also stuff like CFD (computational fluyid dynamics - the type of thing used to design Formula 1 cars and turbine blades) can really eat away at memory.
The high-end CAE/CAD/CAM programs like Unigraphics, IDEAS, MSC (Nastran, Patran etc), Pro/Engineer can use a lot of memory when the model gets really complex and you wnat to manipulate. Basically these programs will use as much memory as you canb give them.
Admittedly these are not particularly common applications (like office).
I haven't checked out the site, but anyone who chooses their university on the basis of opinions posted on a website deserves everything they get. For something as serious as this ("grading" teachers), the internet is simply too anonymous to be taken on it's merits. For example, who's to say that the teacher/prof themself is not posting opinions? Or somebody with a bone to pick doesn't post lots of bad opinions? What sort of cross-checks are there that the person posting the opinion has ever been taught by that prof? etc etc
:)
It also encourages teachers to teach in the manner that influences their grading (ever see the episode of Malcolm in the Middle where the new teacher institutes a ranking table?), just as exaqms encourage students to memorise what's required to pass a unit rather than learn the material so they know and understand it. But I'll get off my soapbox as I'm starting to go off on a bit of a tangent.
And, as is the case with almost every survey that wants opinions, negative opinions will far outweight the positive simply because people rarely bother to comment when the job is well done.
Or is this just another way to force an upgrade cycle?
It may well be one of the intentions of it, but one thing I don't get is that with CPU speeds and hard disk capacities where they are now, the average computer buyer (which probably is not very well represented on slashdot) no longer really needs to upgrade their computer, so changing interface/slot shape/etc won't really matter to them.
I know I'm generalising, but the only applications that really push today's computers are games (and high end scientific programs, but they're a fairly minor special case) and I would guess that most computers are not used primarily for games (ie. "serious gamers" - think families). Serious gamers will always be upgrading their computer to the latest and greatest anyway - they don't need to be forced into an upgrade cycle.
It's getting to the point now where by the time the average family decides they need to upgrade their computer, it is easier (and maybe even cheaper) to just buy the latest middle-of-the-line computer package.
I'd almost question whether the idea whole idea of upgrading is itself becoming obsolete for an average computer user?
then it would most likely be another limited single-goal effort like Apollo.
No, this sort of effort will never happen again, for one very simple reason - it was absolutely staggeringly expensive (at the time). Most people point at Apollo and say how much was achieved (which I'm not disputing), but few people realise just how much money was spent to put a man on the moon. I remember reading (sorry, no ref) that at the height of the Apollo program (which lasted for quite a few years), it was costing about 50 cents (1960 currency remember) per day for every single man, woman and child in the US. Stop and think about that figure for a second - it's mind-blowingly huge.
Why not abandon manned space missions?
Because they have a role to play, alongside unmanned space missions. Humans are adaptable, intelligent, resourceful and capable of coping with the unexpected, among various other qualities that a robot/probe will never be able to match. True, they require more maintenance (food, air, etc), but that's why both options are needed. Use the right tool for the job, not the cheapest - that's how accidents happen.
but you are risking human lives
risk is relative - every time you cross a road you take a bigger risk than flying into space but you still do it. You have accepted the risk (or you have no choice, butyou get my point) and so have the astronauts. They don't need a feel-good bleeding-heart social worker worrying standing up for them - let them do the job they want to do and let them worry about the risks.
and huge negative publicity. And that negative publicity has a bigger effect than anything positive.
That's a very good point, but I argue that you don't not do something simply because somebody (who most likely is not aware of the facts but is speculating, or more likely, just making something up) says it's bad. Of course, the negative publicity is what Joe Public believes and that's the problem. Bad news will always get more press; I'm not sure you can really do anything about it.
I can't help cheering at this news.
OK, a really bad thing happened, but let's learn from it and move on to bigger and better things. I really feel that launching the shuttle again is, symbollically if nothing else, a positive sign that NASA won't abandon manned space missions, something that seemed to be on the cards after the Columbia disaster.
Space exploration (or just working in space) is dangerous - it always has been and (for the forseeable future at least) always will be. There will always be setbacks and it's an expensive 'business', but exploration and curiosity is one of the things that makes us human (see my sig).
Sure 3gig is fine for surfing the web.
and that's what most people do
But I happen to be a big gamer,
that's not what the average internet user does with their bandwidth.
and have been in several Beta Programs for AC2, Eve-online, Chrome, SWG and a few others.
you're now in an even smaller minority.
SWG was a 2gig download!!! There goes my cap for the next month!!
It's not the ISP's problem if SWG is a 2GB download - surely the company could mail it on CD? Remember, you chose to participate in these beta programs that required downloading all these files (and spending most of your time online using up your bandwidth). In any case, you only d/load it once, not every single month.
It's like having a credit card - if you happen to have a big payment one month, you adjust your spending accordingly to cope with it the best you can. If you still want to use your credit card when you know you won't be able to pay it back, then that's your choice; don't blame the bank (unless they offer your 6 year old daughter a credit card - then you can blame the bank!).
My point is that you are not a typical internet user - you are in the (vast) minority and you possibly cost the ISP more money than it is worth to even provide you a service, so you get screwed.
actually, considering that Telstra is still majority owned by the govt (taxpayer), it's hardly surprising that the decisions it makes are not in the best interests of it's shareholders and that the share price has suffered accordingly. It may (does) have a monopoly, but Telstra's ability to exploit that for profit is hamstrung by the fact that it is not really a private (sherholder-owned) corporation, but a govt-owned company which happens to have a lot of private shareholders.
Because Telstra's pricing model probably (rightly) assumes that the average person who used broadband for email, web, the odd online game, etc won't use up their 3GB allocation, so they [Telstra] may well be undercharging for the first 3GB (yes, I'm [educated] guessing), or at least not making much profit at all (probably more likely). I imagine it's a pretty common pricing model - make a tiny profit on a huge number of sales and you make lots of money.
On the other hand, the internet junkies who have programs harvesting mp3s/warez 24/7 for the whole month, while online gaming every single night, etc, etc are the exception to the pricing model, whether they like it or not. This costs the ISP a lot of money (esp when the data has to travel most of the way round the world, in the case of Australia) and the costs will be passed on. Slashdot likely has a disproportianate representation of this group, and the views of it's posters reflects this (IMO).
I think people forget the geographic isolation of Australia from the major internet nodes (eg. US, Europe, Japan/China) - laying cable to even get access to the internet is bloody expensive.
Very interesting comparison, but I think one of the big differences with Oz is how isolated it is from the rest of the world. Canada is next door to the US, which you could arguably call the backbone of the internet. Australia isn't (geographically) close to either US, Europe, or even Japan/China. That makes laying cable, etc *very* expensive, and my guess would be that limits the sheer bandwidth that Aus, as a country, has to the rest of the internet.
The problem Aus has with Telstra is that the govt has privatised part of it (49% I think), so while it is pretending to be a private corporation, it is still majority owned by the state. As a result, it's not clear who (shareholders/citizens) it should be working for. Telstra has a monopoly in it's sector that can well be compared with Microsoft, yet it never seems to do anywhere near as well because it is hampered by having to do please the government and the shareholders, which IMO is frankly not possible.
but "The Matrix" has a good chance at being "The New Star Wars".
Interesting, I've never thought about that before. I would have agreed that The Matrix could have become the new SW, but after seeing Reloaded, it just wasn't good enough for the whole series to become a cult. Don't get me wrong - I really enjoyed Reloaded but if you look at Empire Strikes Back, it was (IMO) much better than SW and that was what made the whole series so good. I can't think of many series since where the sequel surpasses the original.
I guess I should clarify that - the hydrogen bond is the (strong) van der Waals force that forms between the two separate molecules.
eg. in water, you get H--O--H...0--H2 where the "..." represents the hydrogen bond and "--" represents a covalent bond.
sorry, but you're wrong. Hydrogen bonds are a special form of van der Waals 'bonding' which happen to be much, much stronger (as the original poster pointed out) and so they get a special name. A hydrogen bond is usually considered to be when a hydrogen atom is bonded to either N (itrogen), O (xygen) or F (luorine). F is a bit of a special case since it is so electronegative that it forms a much stronger polarisation than either O or N and it forms very, very reactcive bonds - it's why hydrofluoric acid (HF) is so dangerous.
.
H-bonds do not bond H to H, they cause a (part of) a bond to become polarised (the electrons are effectively dragged away from the H atom), creating a very strong van der Waals force.
Van der Waals force works between any two reasonably flat surfaces
van der Waals forces work between [bonded] atoms. A surface just has a larger area so you get more bonds in "action", hence a larger force of adhesion.
and any surface is flat on a small enough scale, which is what this tape is exploiting.
no, completely wrong - the smaller the scale, the rougher the surface. That's why surface roughness (Ra, Rs, cla) measurements are all standardised to a certain length
The gecko exploits the fact that it has a high surface contact area to mass ratio (look at the size of the pads on the feet to it's body size).
who in turn picked it up from Nature Materials, where the full article is soon to be published. The abstract is here (advance online publication) and if you've got a subscription to Nature Materials you can get the full article from there.
Have you ever tried drinking Guiness quickly?
... and I don't mean the hangover (which, strangely, I don't seem to get from guinness)!
yep, plenty of times. Succeeded quite spectacularly (in getting very drunk) most of the time too.
Now the real problem with a night's boozing on the black stuff shows itself the next day
great suggestion. Here's some of my favourites, fiction & non-fiction. You'll probably spot some themes :)
NON-FICTION:
* Joe Simpson - Touching the Void ("Dark Shadows Falling" is good too, but "Touching the Void" is the one you won't be able to put down)
* Jon Krakauer - Into Thin Air (you should probably also read Anatoli Boukreev's "The Climb" for his account of the Everest tragedy, though it's nowhere near as good a book as Krakauer's)
* Nick Hornby - Fever Pitch (for all sports fans)
* Steven Vogel - Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People
* Simon Winchester - The Map That Changed the World
* David Attenborough - Life On Air (biography)
FICTION:
* George RR Martin - A Song of Ice and Fire series
* Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars (the rest of the trilogy is also good, but nowhere near as good as the first book IMO)
* Matthew Reilly - Ice Station (I challenge anyone to put this down once the action starts)
* Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front (should be required reading for everyone)
* Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
* Stephen King - Christine
* Robert Ludlum - The Bourne Identity (please don't judge this on the movie - the book is on another level)
* John Fowles - The Collector
* Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series
there's lots more, but hopefully there's some decent ideas for someone there.
well, the specsheets on the website list the modulus (assume they are talking tensile, not bulk/shear/compressive) as 62-79GPA (spectra 900), 98-113GPa (1000) and 113-124GPa (2000) which are the numbers I used.
I never said it wasn't impressive material; it certainly is, especially when you consider the basic material, UHMWPE, has a modulus of about 40MPa.
I mean, I can't imagine that if cost wasn't a consideration, any place where you wouldn't want a lighter material vs. the heavier one.
See that's just the problem. It's great in theory, but in a real-world problem there is almost never a point where cost is not a consideration. In fact, in many everyday, mundane design situations, it is the primary consideration.
There's some far sexier materials out there though (not really mass-produced) - some of the nano-stuff that's being played with is really interesting (but completely impractical!), metallic foams and some biological materials are turning out to have some pretty impressive (and unique) combinations of material properties. Shape-memory alloys are also pretty neat.
okay. start my own rant.
:)
As an engineer I get fed up with people claiming product X is stronger than steel, etc, etc. You almost always (as in the case of spectra) find that what they are talking about is specific strength, which measures mechanical strength per unit weight. It doesn't mean it's stronger than steel. The modulus of steel (el cheapo low carbon) is roughly 200GPa, spectra is 60-124 or less than half as strong.
the tensile strength of 3GPa is the UTS - ultimate tensile strength. UTS is where the material catastrophically, and unrecoverably, fails. The material will have yielded (and possibly weakened) well before this stress level is reached.
Steel will almost always be the basic material of choice, except when weight is important, for the simple reasons that it is strong, easy to work with, easy to manufacture into almost anything and, most importantly, cheap.
okay. end my own rant
the rounding is only on the final payment at the till, not on individual items. And it's only for cash transactions, not electronic transactions. Sometimes it rounds in your favour, sometimes in the store's favour, but it evens out in the end. Yes, it can be manipulated to save you a cent or two here and there, but anyone doing that should probably worry about getting a life first.