The hydrogen wasn't the problem, it was the fact that the skin was made of solid rocket fuel. It was actually the skin that was burning, since hydrogen burns so hot you can't see the flames.
This gets posted every time hydrogen gets mentioned. However, you have to ask the question: what would have happened had the Hindenburg been filled with Helium? Probably, the flammable skin would have burned off, leaving the inner frame and inert gas bags relatively intact. The helium bags probably would burst, but the inert gas would help to cool the fire. The airship might have gently settled to the ground in one piece as the gas escaped.
As it happened, much of the hydrogen did burn, greatly increasing the intensity and size of the fire. The framework of the airship collapsed into a heap of white hot melted girders. I also highly doubt that the biggest PR nightmare - the huge mushroom cloud - would have formed without the hydrogen burning to create a huge updraft.
Anyway, the Hindenburg is irrelevant since nobody is proposing to use hydrogen stored at atmospheric pressure in fabric bags twice the length of a 747. It would be nice if people stopped bringing it up altogether.
Yea, but so does natural gas and the energy value of what is burned off in the Gulf of Mexico, anually, is greater than the entire energy consumption of the US in 1,000 years.
That statement is patently absurd. Think about what you're saying: Every 8 hours, a few oil rigs in the gulf of mexico are burning an amount of natural gas to equal to the entire U.S. annual energy consumption.
Let's do the math: The US uses about 100 exajoules per year, or 10e20 joules. That would be about 2.7e15 grams of oil, or 2700 megatons. This amount of energy would be burned off by, (let's assume), 200 oil rigs every 8 hours. That would mean that each rig would be burning 39 megatons of waste gas per day, or 450 tons per second. That's as much as 30 Saturn V rockets going full bore for each oil rig.
That little pipe sticking out the side of a rig is simply not burning that much gas.
The main thing that will worry most people is where the fuel is comming from.
Uranium may well be available on Mars, but I can't imagine they will have the facilities to mine it.
Most people aren't aware that there are dozens of Soviet-era nuclear reactors whizzing over their heads every day. These full-fledged reactors (not RTGs) powered the RORSAT naval radar surveillance satellites. Over 30 were launched. A couple accidents sent the reactor cores crashing to earth (most famously in Canada in 1978), but most remain in parking orbits that will decay within a few hundred years.
If they're looking for a fuel source, cleaning up that orbiting nuclear waste would be a good place to start.
(Each satellite only operated for a few months; I'd be surprised if they used more than 1 millionth of the energy available in the fuel.)
BTW, The later models ejected the cores on shutdown for increased safety, releasing the liquid sodium coolant into space. These coolant drops account for a large fraction of orbiting space debris that threaten other satellites today.
Check out the hydrogen-fueled V8 bus engine towards the bottom of that page. I think that people would gladly pay a premium for alternative fuel vehicles if it meant that they could have that kind of intake manifold sticking out of their hoods.
The problem is, there's an annoying group of "environmentalists" who call windmills eyesores... and that's why this idea isn't taking off.
No, the problem is that almost nobody's back yard is windy enough to economically produce wind-generated electricity.
Anyway, the people complaining about the aesthetics of windmills in your back yard wouldn't be environmentalists. They would be the anal members of your subdivision's architectural control committee: The folks who send you letters if your flower beds have too many weeds or you didn't properly submit a paint chip for approval before repainting your house.
Any language that is *only* objected oriented is forcing you to look at everything as nails.
You don't have to use Python's object oriented features. For example, you can find all of the 22-character long English words with only the tiniest sprinkling of OO:
>>>for w in filter(lambda x: len(x) == 22, file('/usr/share/dict/words').readlines()): print w
electroencephalograph
Mediterraneanizations
OTOH, people high on OO could write:
>>> print 22. __add__(3)
25
Python gives you both hammers and vice grips.
A custom desk form my PCs
on
iWorkstations?
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· Score: 1
I use this custom desk for my PCs. It is the perfect aesthetic match for my mail-order generic beige cases. And at $37, it's affordable, too.
Just as the mac table holds exactly the equipment a mac user needs/can afford, my table accomodates my monitor, KVM switch, printer, scanner, speakers, network hub, firewall, and fax machine, with room left over for note paper, coffee cups, pens, USB gadgets, CDs and manuals. It has plenty of space below for my 5 PCs and their huge tangle of cables.
As an 31337 mod, I've added a sliding keyboard/mouse tray and a clip-on desk lamp. I've been using this setup for years, and I really can't find anything wrong with it.
I would never put my SSN on a resume, but the last time I made a resume I ran the.doc file through 'less'. Sure enough, most all of my edit history was in there.
I exported it to RTF then reimported before saving it again as.doc. This erased other people's access to my thought processes, and it reduced the file size by 80% to boot.
In the end it didn't matter much, though. I usually include a plain text version of the resume right in my email as a backup along with the.doc attachment. On interviews, I've noticed that most people just print the plain text version. If I really didn't need to make the word doc, and people are too lazy to print it, why do companies insist you send it in.doc format anyway?
"...But there are big engineering issues--thermal fatigue, noise..."...Potential explosions...
That reminds me of the quote from Colonel Albert Pope in the 1890s (owner of one of the first electric car companies): Internal combustion engines will never take off because "people won't want to sit on top of an explosion".
This is why the founders of the United States wisely put the military under control of the civilian leadership. They knew that the military attracts pinheads who would think that a four-point list covering the technical capabilities of a weapon answers any questions about whether it should actually be deployed.
Unfortunately, the weakness in our system of checks and balances is that it assumes that the civilian leadership is capable of performing its oversight role. One of the duties of every president is to filter out the most dangerous proposals from the various warmongers under his command. I don't see too much of that happening lately.
Using these on a space shuttle might not be a bad idea, ie- crawling around outside and inspecting things before take off. And later- making external in-flight repairs...
Let's imagine a future space shuttle mission. It is streaking through the atmosphere during reentry, except now there is a dome-shaped metal head poking out a hatch on the top.
Suddenly, the heat shield tiles fail, and glowing bits of molten debris start flying off of the spacecraft. Fortunately the pilot yells "R2! The shields are breached!". The robot extends a spindly arm with a fire extenguisher on the end and sprays the damaged area. The shuttle is saved.
In other words, when IBM bought Sequent, what happened to the Sequent-AT&T agreement? Were it made null and all dealings between Sequent and AT&T now under the stipulations of the IBM-AT&T agreement? Or is it the case that code developed by Sequent is still bound by the original Sequent-AT&T contract?
It just goes to show that whether it's object-oriented programming or contract law, multiple inheritance is likely to be hard to understand.
I conclude that the people on the jury had zero qualifications to judge the technical merits of the question. It probably boiled down to which expert was a better BSer.
To accurately answer the question of "is it obvious to someone with ordinary skill in the art", you need ask a special panel of software developers, not a handful of random people pulled off the street.
The whole patent obviousness issue is in need of a serious overhaul. I've got a few patents courtesy of a big corporation I worked for many years ago. Every once and a while they would send patent attorneys to troll through the engineering groups looking for random things to patent. They would come in and tell us: "Don't worry if you think your ideas seem obvious. What's obvious to you isn't necessarily obvious to the patent examiner. The legal standards for 'obvious' are very low." From what I could tell, almost no idea was considered "obvious", and things have gotten much worse since then.
Here's what's obvious to me in this case: Assume you went back to 1994 and gathered up a random group of 50 competent software developers. Give them the problem of having a server present interactive content to users of hypertext clients. I guarantee that 80% of them would have independently come up with plug-in based architectures very similar to what we see in all browsers today.
We need some way to incorporate such common sense notions of obviousness into the patent screening process.
Re:There goes my number-one excuse
on
Chimera Twins Story
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Whenever you see someone who wears half of a goatee, it's a dead giveaway you're dealing with of these chimera twins. I don't see any issues with identifying them.
If I give up my ownership, do I get my $15K back? Something tells me no.
Even though your software license is nontransferrable, non-reinstallable and nonrefundable, you still get to keep it. Your $15,000 keepsake will be yours to cherish forever.
I suggest folding it up into a little square and putting it in a pendant. Give this to your wife as a gift. It cost about as much as a quality 2-carat diamond, and it has the same intrinsic value. She'll really appreciate this heirloom as a token of your affection for her.
WRONG! Whenever I have to use lsof to find a goddamned open file handle on the CD-ROM, my blood boils.
When I hit that eject button, I want the goddamned CD out of my sytem, Now! No exceptions. I don't care if I get an I/O error. Just give me the damned disk.
How in the hell is any normal user supposed to know about lsof anyway? All he knows is that the CD drive is broken.
Let's take a little breather, so to speak, shall we?
...
If you don't like it, or don't want to assume the risk, stay the hell out. Don't whip out a gun and threaten death to the bar owner. You aren't so god damned great. What unbelievable arrogance!
You call that outburst a "breather"? You seem a little jittery. Maybe you ought to cut back a little on the smokes.
A resturant/pub owner should be able to make-up his own damn mind about whether or not to allow smoking on the premisses.
He's not allowed to make up his own damned mind about putting a poison like arsenic in the customers' drinking water. Why should he be be allowed to let his establishment become filled with poisonous contaminated air?
It's up to the PEOPLE that frequent those places to decide whether the risk of inhaling second-hand smoke outweighs their desire to eat there rather
No, it's up to the smokers who frequent those places to decide whether the distress of fighting back their addiction for an hour outweighs their desire to eat there.
Who care if they were found "guily"? The law is wrong. It should be changed.
When pimply-faced teenagers assert that they can download MP3s because "the law is wrong", they face a barrage of righteous indignation from those who say they have a moral obligation to follow the law as it is written.
When a giant multinational corporation continues to use its monopoly status to manipulate the market because "the law is wrong", we're all just supposed to let it slide.
Slashdot Mirror
This gets posted every time hydrogen gets mentioned. However, you have to ask the question: what would have happened had the Hindenburg been filled with Helium? Probably, the flammable skin would have burned off, leaving the inner frame and inert gas bags relatively intact. The helium bags probably would burst, but the inert gas would help to cool the fire. The airship might have gently settled to the ground in one piece as the gas escaped.
As it happened, much of the hydrogen did burn, greatly increasing the intensity and size of the fire. The framework of the airship collapsed into a heap of white hot melted girders. I also highly doubt that the biggest PR nightmare - the huge mushroom cloud - would have formed without the hydrogen burning to create a huge updraft.
Anyway, the Hindenburg is irrelevant since nobody is proposing to use hydrogen stored at atmospheric pressure in fabric bags twice the length of a 747. It would be nice if people stopped bringing it up altogether.
That statement is patently absurd. Think about what you're saying: Every 8 hours, a few oil rigs in the gulf of mexico are burning an amount of natural gas to equal to the entire U.S. annual energy consumption.
Let's do the math: The US uses about 100 exajoules per year, or 10e20 joules. That would be about 2.7e15 grams of oil, or 2700 megatons. This amount of energy would be burned off by, (let's assume), 200 oil rigs every 8 hours. That would mean that each rig would be burning 39 megatons of waste gas per day, or 450 tons per second. That's as much as 30 Saturn V rockets going full bore for each oil rig.
That little pipe sticking out the side of a rig is simply not burning that much gas.
Uranium may well be available on Mars, but I can't imagine they will have the facilities to mine it.
Most people aren't aware that there are dozens of Soviet-era nuclear reactors whizzing over their heads every day. These full-fledged reactors (not RTGs) powered the RORSAT naval radar surveillance satellites. Over 30 were launched. A couple accidents sent the reactor cores crashing to earth (most famously in Canada in 1978), but most remain in parking orbits that will decay within a few hundred years.
If they're looking for a fuel source, cleaning up that orbiting nuclear waste would be a good place to start. (Each satellite only operated for a few months; I'd be surprised if they used more than 1 millionth of the energy available in the fuel.)
BTW, The later models ejected the cores on shutdown for increased safety, releasing the liquid sodium coolant into space. These coolant drops account for a large fraction of orbiting space debris that threaten other satellites today.
Check out the hydrogen-fueled V8 bus engine towards the bottom of that page. I think that people would gladly pay a premium for alternative fuel vehicles if it meant that they could have that kind of intake manifold sticking out of their hoods.
Cut the blue wire.
No, the problem is that almost nobody's back yard is windy enough to economically produce wind-generated electricity.
Anyway, the people complaining about the aesthetics of windmills in your back yard wouldn't be environmentalists. They would be the anal members of your subdivision's architectural control committee: The folks who send you letters if your flower beds have too many weeds or you didn't properly submit a paint chip for approval before repainting your house.
Try: .__add__(3)
2
or even: .__add__(3)
2.
You don't have to use Python's object oriented features. For example, you can find all of the 22-character long English words with only the tiniest sprinkling of OO:
>>>for w in filter(lambda x: len(x) == 22, file('/usr/share/dict/words').readlines()): print w
electroencephalograph
Mediterraneanizations
OTOH, people high on OO could write:
>>> print 22. __add__(3)
25
Python gives you both hammers and vice grips.
Just as the mac table holds exactly the equipment a mac user needs/can afford, my table accomodates my monitor, KVM switch, printer, scanner, speakers, network hub, firewall, and fax machine, with room left over for note paper, coffee cups, pens, USB gadgets, CDs and manuals. It has plenty of space below for my 5 PCs and their huge tangle of cables.
As an 31337 mod, I've added a sliding keyboard/mouse tray and a clip-on desk lamp. I've been using this setup for years, and I really can't find anything wrong with it.
I exported it to RTF then reimported before saving it again as .doc. This erased other people's access to my thought processes, and it reduced the file size by 80% to boot.
In the end it didn't matter much, though. I usually include a plain text version of the resume right in my email as a backup along with the .doc attachment. On interviews, I've noticed that most people just print the plain text version. If I really didn't need to make the word doc, and people are too lazy to print it, why do companies insist you send it in .doc format anyway?
That reminds me of the quote from Colonel Albert Pope in the 1890s (owner of one of the first electric car companies): Internal combustion engines will never take off because "people won't want to sit on top of an explosion".
Unfortunately, the weakness in our system of checks and balances is that it assumes that the civilian leadership is capable of performing its oversight role. One of the duties of every president is to filter out the most dangerous proposals from the various warmongers under his command. I don't see too much of that happening lately.
Let's imagine a future space shuttle mission. It is streaking through the atmosphere during reentry, except now there is a dome-shaped metal head poking out a hatch on the top.
Suddenly, the heat shield tiles fail, and glowing bits of molten debris start flying off of the spacecraft. Fortunately the pilot yells "R2! The shields are breached!". The robot extends a spindly arm with a fire extenguisher on the end and sprays the damaged area. The shuttle is saved.
It just goes to show that whether it's object-oriented programming or contract law, multiple inheritance is likely to be hard to understand.
I conclude that the people on the jury had zero qualifications to judge the technical merits of the question. It probably boiled down to which expert was a better BSer.
To accurately answer the question of "is it obvious to someone with ordinary skill in the art", you need ask a special panel of software developers, not a handful of random people pulled off the street.
Here's what's obvious to me in this case: Assume you went back to 1994 and gathered up a random group of 50 competent software developers. Give them the problem of having a server present interactive content to users of hypertext clients. I guarantee that 80% of them would have independently come up with plug-in based architectures very similar to what we see in all browsers today.
We need some way to incorporate such common sense notions of obviousness into the patent screening process.
Whenever you see someone who wears half of a goatee, it's a dead giveaway you're dealing with of these chimera twins. I don't see any issues with identifying them.
That was a bug caused by an endian conversion issue. The real total is supposed to be a more plausible 37 million. It's fixed in the current tree.
Even though your software license is nontransferrable, non-reinstallable and nonrefundable, you still get to keep it. Your $15,000 keepsake will be yours to cherish forever.
I suggest folding it up into a little square and putting it in a pendant. Give this to your wife as a gift. It cost about as much as a quality 2-carat diamond, and it has the same intrinsic value. She'll really appreciate this heirloom as a token of your affection for her.
I've got no time to spend on that kind of introspection. I'm to busy dodging these four stinking ghosts who are after my ass 24x7.
When I hit that eject button, I want the goddamned CD out of my sytem, Now! No exceptions. I don't care if I get an I/O error. Just give me the damned disk.
How in the hell is any normal user supposed to know about lsof anyway? All he knows is that the CD drive is broken.
If you don't like it, or don't want to assume the risk, stay the hell out. Don't whip out a gun and threaten death to the bar owner. You aren't so god damned great. What unbelievable arrogance!
You call that outburst a "breather"? You seem a little jittery. Maybe you ought to cut back a little on the smokes.
He's not allowed to make up his own damned mind about putting a poison like arsenic in the customers' drinking water. Why should he be be allowed to let his establishment become filled with poisonous contaminated air?
No, it's up to the smokers who frequent those places to decide whether the distress of fighting back their addiction for an hour outweighs their desire to eat there.
When pimply-faced teenagers assert that they can download MP3s because "the law is wrong", they face a barrage of righteous indignation from those who say they have a moral obligation to follow the law as it is written.
When a giant multinational corporation continues to use its monopoly status to manipulate the market because "the law is wrong", we're all just supposed to let it slide.