Those results are NOT field day, but the JUNE VHF QSO Party - I really didn't think the results for FD would be up yet, considering it was this weekend
Back when, before Microsoft outsourced a lot of their call centers, and they were still mid sized, they actually had a DJ that would play music, and announce the call queue lenghts, in both numbers, and estimated wait time "That was XXX - The Office queue is 5 people, and estimated to be 10 minutes, Visual Basic is 6 people and 20 minutes, SQL server...." etc
Never mind that - sit down, do your.5*MV^2 numbers - you don't NEED 1m accuracy. If you put a say, 500 lb block of concrete in orbit, you put some small amount of ablative coating, and let it reenter
Let's assume we about 75% of the 300km orbital speed on impact - call it 6000m/s, and 200 Kilos, you get 4.5e9 Joules and you get the equivilent of 975 Kilos of TNT
The Velcro is OK - but you can always work on the "Tie wraps are cheap" theory (aka, cut them) - another choice (rarely seen) is to learn to use lacing cord - cheap, and will hold huge bundles neatly, and even pull them tight
Well, back in the "Old" days, I'd say the other 2 types of racing that were exciting as F1 were CanAm and the same eras GT/LeMans type cars - the Era of the Porsche 917, for Ford GT40, etc - Each of those cars (along with Ferrari) had a small period where they totally dominated the field.
Hey, The 3 out of my 4 2m Rigs have nice TIGHT front ends - not hard to buy either. Stop looking for out of band receive. I bought commercial gear, in my case (pun) GE, but Motorola is just as good. Yeah, the stuff is larger, if bought new, a LOT more expensive, doesn't have as many features, but when other folks are plagued with intermod, or birdies, my rig is quiet, you can HEAR the HT I carry, even in a noisy environment, and if I drop it on the floor, it bounces
Of couse, to by that HT NEW would run you about $1800 USD vs, what, $200 for a new 2mHT? Of course, by shopping around, I got a used rig for that same $200
The big problem with that? You live on a small island nation, that is what, 550 miles north/south and 200 miles at it's widest? (total of 241590 sq km land area)
Compare this to the US - 9.1+ Million sq km of land area - we have to cover larger areas
BTW, one of the interesting things is that the US happens to be one of the most efficient users of energy in the world - yes, we use the most, but we also produce MORE with that energy than anyone else - the biggest gains are to be had in other countries!! Yes, we use gas guzzling cars, but we make up for it in other places
As I said - I don't burn a heck of a lot of gas, even considering I own a truck to carry my stuff - I use about 70 US gallons/year. How can I do that? Simple - I keep it parked.
Oh, and for smoke - go talk to China - they produce a shit load more smoke per unit output than we do -
UK Oil prices are a choice, and are that high due to taxes
One of the factors that allows taxes in that price range, and allows the effcient use of mass transit is size of the country and density of population
I'll gave you an example
I participate in what is in the US a fairly obscure hobby - Live Steam Trains - The CLOSEST place I can run those trains is 50 miles away, and for most of the US that is close
In England the hobby is MUCH more common. A few years back, the was a huge 100th year celebration, and I knew folks who would not go because it required a 40 mile drive.
The fact is, here in the US, we are more than willing to live 40 miles from work, and make that commute every day, where in England, that is fairly rare
If the government put another $3 of tax on Gas (which is why your at $5.20), we would simply vote them out of office
That said, in the average month, I drive about 100 miles, I take mass transit to work, and have a choice of 2 cars - a fairly fuel effcient Saturn, and yes, a Quad Cab Pickup - We use the small car except when we have to haul stuff around (a side effect of the hobby). If you made gas $5/gal, I'd bitch and moan, but it would not make any difference for what _I_ do, as the extra $180/year really doesn't mean much to me, and my wife's commute (in the Saturn) can NOT be done with mass transit in any reasonable period of time due to it being "reverse flow" - that would cost us $1500/year extra
Yep - that's the big factor. Let's face it, Con-Agra isn't doing this for fun - they are doing this to make MONEY. They can do that one of 2 ways
1)Reduce expenses or 2)Increase sales of products
In this case, thy seem to have found something that does BOTH - The BIGGER is the savings in landfill costs. I remember seeing an article last year that said it reduced the flow do the landfill by something like 90% or more. Believe it or not, in rasing poulty, landfill costs are a non trivial part of your expenses The feathers, bones, inards, and fecal waste is a HUGE problem. If you can reduce this expense 90%, your a hero. Even if the cost is higher, you might only save 40% for that 90% volume reduction - Still a good deal
Now, at the end you get 500 Barrels of oil a day - at the current price of $40/barrel, that's $20k/day in their pocket - in less than 3 years, they have paid for the plant....
So if you have a win/win, IF the plant turns out to have operating expenses in the order of magnitude they expect - which is why you build ONE to start - to test your theory
Been there - drank that. And when you you geeks get older, you probably will too - It's called a Colonoscopy, and you should really start getting them around age 40
OK, think about it - States like NY, CA etc require Oxygenated Gas, by LAW. Now there are 2 commercially viable ways to do this as of right now 1)MBTE and 2)10% ethanol in your gas
Now NY, and I belive CA (and others) have BANNED MBTE (it's NASTY stuff), so that means the gas companies have to buy 10% of their end product from ethanol producers. Now, let's say THEY get into the game of making ethanol, and can make it for 25% less than the OTHER gas company. Do you think they are going to lower their profits? Heck no, they will produce as much ethanol as they can, and sell it at the "going rate" and make a nice profit on the ethanol, and then keep selling the gas at the same price - it's a nice profit center for them.
Do NOT think of them as "gas companies" - think of them as "energy companies" - they want to amke a profit on as much of your energy use as they can
WAY back when, when news stories were delivered by teletype, I was at a small radio station that was NOT on the air 24x7. The thing is, when you had a contract with AP, they SENT you enough paper to run the teletype 24x7, and they did NOT want it back, and there seemed to be no way to say "Please, do NOT send any paper for the next 6 month contract, we have way too much..." (Let's face it, if you only run 12-14 hours a day, after a year, you almost have a spare years worth of paper)
Well, one day, we wallpapered a hall, and left out magic markers, and told people "Go nuts" - it was the graffiti wall. Took up about 2 cases of paper. We took the OTHER 30 or so cases down to recyling
You boss has probably run into something I've seen way too may times that I'll sum up with a quote:
"There is a huge difference between 10 years of experience, and 1 year of experience ten times"
Unfortunately, there are way way too may programmers out there who hit a certain level of experience (usually around their 2nd or 3rd year), who then never learn anything more - they just do the same thing over and over again
IF you can find a programmer who keeps learning/ improving, a 10 year guys knows a HECK of a lot more than a 2 year guy. I will say, however, that from experience, the curve seems to be asymptotic - there is no way near as much difference between a 5 year guy and a 10 year guy, as a 10 and a 15, or a 15 and a 20 - and yes, I've been doing this for 22 years now
BTW In an accident that bad, MANY times they can tell exactly how fast you were going at impact, without fancy models, etc. I was talking with a guy from NTSB, oh, 15 years ago, and he showed me HOW
The look at your speedometer. In an impact that bad, there is USUALLY enough flex in the needle of the speedo that it TAPS the face of the gage, and usually leaves a small smuge of it's color on the gage - one microphoto, a little bit of expert witness testimony, and you've got the same problem
RE Encrypting with nothing to hide - yep, I used to do that until friends stopped - I would still prefer to use encrypted mail, and do with the few friends who still do.
Remember that is part of comsec - never let them know what is important. You can even send out RANDOM traffic to random recipients on your list. (or non random, patterned) that might contain nothing but trash, or contain the real message - when you have a real message, you slip it in place of one of the "patterned" messages - Yes, they will know your network, but not when you are talking from person X to Person Y. Or, you use dead drops (say, usegroups) and drop in "trash" once a day in x group - 99.9% of the time, it's nothing. Your contact reads it all the time (and everyone else gets it too) - most times, it's trash, sometimes, it "gold"
I wonder about this one - not that the laws exist, but if the courts would uphold it, and if they did, there are some wonderful ways you can mess with the system.
Let's say you name your kid, Bo3b. The state says "no", and you say, that's his name, and REFUSE to name him something else. What are they going to do? The standard "no name" name for in infant would be Baby "last name", and if the last name is unknown, "Doe"
You just put his name down, every time as Bo3b.... Really, how can they STOP you
I wrote software for a system like this once, but there was a few SLIGHT changes
The company had an OBJECTIVE way to measure the perfomance of each office or unit (proffit/loss - the bottom line) - if you were in a support group, like IS/IT, your departments rating was the SAME as the group(s) you supported - aka, your DEPARTMENTS rating was going to be a 1-5
Now, here's the important part - EVERYONE in the department starts the review off with the AVERAGE review of the department - aka, your department was a 3, everyone starts off at a 3, your department was a 4, everyone starts at a 4!
Your manager could then increase/decrease each person's review by 1 point, however, the AVERAGE of the department could NOT change. So, if you bumped a person UP from, say 3 to 4 (higher was better), you had to DROP someone from a 3 to a 2
Then inside each ranking, you had
1)Job category
and
2)Position in pay scale for that category
You were either "Underpaid", "Average" or "Overpaid" (MY terms, not theirs) Your raise amount differed by which bracket you were in - a 4 who was in the bottom bracket could expect a much better raise than a 4 who was in top bracket. A 2 in the middle or top had better not be expecting a raise - they weren't getting one, where a bottom 2 MIGHT. The 1s? At BEST they were getting warning notes, if not a pink slip
I traveled around the country with the HR folks installing the review database and data. Security was VERY tight. How tight? The server where this would be installed had ALL it's passwords LOCKED OUT, including all Admin passwords, except for MINE, and that was a random password generated at Home office. During the 1-2 days that the database existed on that server, it was NOT backed up, it was NOT in production, it was ONLY on the local segement, and ONLY the managers were allowed on a PC on that segment
It was an "interesting" time - when we walked into the office for "review time" you could SEE the sweat - the GOOD news is that almost all units were 3+. ONCE, and ONLY once did I walk into a field office that was rated a 2, and that was mostly because there were 2 departments that were rated 1 in the building. Let's put it this way - it was NOT pretty for those 2 departments - out of about 20 employees in those departments, I think 5 were left the next day. The FUN days were when you walked into a field office that was a 4 or 5. Those offices 1)Had their act together, and 2)Usually had enough of a clue to KNOW it - there was no sweat, and when we left at the end of 2 days, everyone was happy (10% raises were common for "average paid" line folks (more for lower paid), and this was before the.com boom)
OK, as one of the posters said - The "Hydrogen" bomb started off as a "fission/fusion" bomb - with MOST of the yeald being from the fission, believe it ot not. As things progressed, they DID come out with almost pure fusion bombs (only a small kicker to start it) - today, from what I've read, most are "3 stage" - fission/fusion/fission
A few months back, there was the links here to the famous, now declassified paper on "How the atomic bomb works" with DETAILS - like, what shape you make the pit, why most moderen nukes have a mini cyclotron in them, an what the refelectors are. The BIG detail turns out to be "time" - the fact that the xrays, light and particles from the starter fission explosion can get to the other end of the weapon before the pressure wave can, so they can be used to trigger the 2nd and 3rd stage
My first thought was "M-60 Machine Gun" - it's possible to put the bolt carrier in backwards - then you get "click" instead of BANG. From what I understand it finnaly WAS redesigned in a later rev that it could only go together the right way
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, I'm the guy who corrected him - why you ragging on me?
Yep, I'm a ham, see my sig - I was working with a 3A station in ENY - it ended up we could have claimed 3e, but....
Those results are NOT field day, but the JUNE VHF QSO Party - I really didn't think the results for FD would be up yet, considering it was this weekend
Back when, before Microsoft outsourced a lot of their call centers, and they were still mid sized, they actually had a DJ that would play music, and announce the call queue lenghts, in both numbers, and estimated wait time "That was XXX - The Office queue is 5 people, and estimated to be 10 minutes, Visual Basic is 6 people and 20 minutes, SQL server...." etc
Never mind that - sit down, do your .5*MV^2 numbers - you don't NEED 1m accuracy. If you put a say, 500 lb block of concrete in orbit, you put some small amount of ablative coating, and let it reenter
Let's assume we about 75% of the 300km orbital speed on impact - call it 6000m/s, and 200 Kilos, you get 4.5e9 Joules and you get the equivilent of 975 Kilos of TNT
It's a pretty big bang
The Velcro is OK - but you can always work on the "Tie wraps are cheap" theory (aka, cut them) - another choice (rarely seen) is to learn to use lacing cord - cheap, and will hold huge bundles neatly, and even pull them tight
Actually, the "funny looking plane" is one of 4 remaining Beach Starships (50 built) - again, a Rutan design, but one that was a commercial flop
Well, back in the "Old" days, I'd say the other 2 types of racing that were exciting as F1 were CanAm and the same eras GT/LeMans type cars - the Era of the Porsche 917, for Ford GT40, etc - Each of those cars (along with Ferrari) had a small period where they totally dominated the field.
Hey,
The 3 out of my 4 2m Rigs have nice TIGHT front ends - not hard to buy either. Stop looking for out of band receive. I bought commercial gear, in my case (pun) GE, but Motorola is just as good. Yeah, the stuff is larger, if bought new, a LOT more expensive, doesn't have as many features, but when other folks are plagued with intermod, or birdies, my rig is quiet, you can HEAR the HT I carry, even in a noisy environment, and if I drop it on the floor, it bounces
Of couse, to by that HT NEW would run you about $1800 USD vs, what, $200 for a new 2mHT? Of course, by shopping around, I got a used rig for that same $200
You pay your money, you make your choices...
Hey Peter,
I know you from somewhere?
Charlie
kc2ixe
The big problem with that? You live on a small island nation, that is what, 550 miles north/south and 200 miles at it's widest? (total of 241590 sq km land area)
Compare this to the US - 9.1+ Million sq km of land area - we have to cover larger areas
BTW, one of the interesting things is that the US happens to be one of the most efficient users of energy in the world - yes, we use the most, but we also produce MORE with that energy than anyone else - the biggest gains are to be had in other countries!! Yes, we use gas guzzling cars, but we make up for it in other places
As I said - I don't burn a heck of a lot of gas, even considering I own a truck to carry my stuff - I use about 70 US gallons/year. How can I do that? Simple - I keep it parked.
Oh, and for smoke - go talk to China - they produce a shit load more smoke per unit output than we do -
UK Oil prices are a choice, and are that high due to taxes
One of the factors that allows taxes in that price range, and allows the effcient use of mass transit is size of the country and density of population
I'll gave you an example
I participate in what is in the US a fairly obscure hobby - Live Steam Trains - The CLOSEST place I can run those trains is 50 miles away, and for most of the US that is close
In England the hobby is MUCH more common. A few years back, the was a huge 100th year celebration, and I knew folks who would not go because it required a 40 mile drive.
The fact is, here in the US, we are more than willing to live 40 miles from work, and make that commute every day, where in England, that is fairly rare
If the government put another $3 of tax on Gas (which is why your at $5.20), we would simply vote them out of office
That said, in the average month, I drive about 100 miles, I take mass transit to work, and have a choice of 2 cars - a fairly fuel effcient Saturn, and yes, a Quad Cab Pickup - We use the small car except when we have to haul stuff around (a side effect of the hobby). If you made gas $5/gal, I'd bitch and moan, but it would not make any difference for what _I_ do, as the extra $180/year really doesn't mean much to me, and my wife's commute (in the Saturn) can NOT be done with mass transit in any reasonable period of time due to it being "reverse flow" - that would cost us $1500/year extra
Yep - that's the big factor. Let's face it, Con-Agra isn't doing this for fun - they are doing this to make MONEY. They can do that one of 2 ways
1)Reduce expenses
or
2)Increase sales of products
In this case, thy seem to have found something that does BOTH - The BIGGER is the savings in landfill costs. I remember seeing an article last year that said it reduced the flow do the landfill by something like 90% or more. Believe it or not, in rasing poulty, landfill costs are a non trivial part of your expenses The feathers, bones, inards, and fecal waste is a HUGE problem. If you can reduce this expense 90%, your a hero. Even if the cost is higher, you might only save 40% for that 90% volume reduction - Still a good deal
Now, at the end you get 500 Barrels of oil a day - at the current price of $40/barrel, that's $20k/day in their pocket - in less than 3 years, they have paid for the plant....
So if you have a win/win, IF the plant turns out to have operating expenses in the order of magnitude they expect - which is why you build ONE to start - to test your theory
Simple, it's speed dependant
Or to put it in SciFi terms
"The Slow Blade Penetrates The Shield"
Been there - drank that. And when you you geeks get older, you probably will too - It's called a Colonoscopy, and you should really start getting them around age 40
I think your being a bit paranoid too
OK, think about it - States like NY, CA etc require Oxygenated Gas, by LAW. Now there are 2 commercially viable ways to do this as of right now
1)MBTE
and
2)10% ethanol in your gas
Now NY, and I belive CA (and others) have BANNED MBTE (it's NASTY stuff), so that means the gas companies have to buy 10% of their end product from ethanol producers. Now, let's say THEY get into the game of making ethanol, and can make it for 25% less than the OTHER gas company. Do you think they are going to lower their profits? Heck no, they will produce as much ethanol as they can, and sell it at the "going rate" and make a nice profit on the ethanol, and then keep selling the gas at the same price - it's a nice profit center for them.
Do NOT think of them as "gas companies" - think of them as "energy companies" - they want to amke a profit on as much of your energy use as they can
Way OT, and probably ready to be modded redundant by now - Send her my "get well soon" wishes
WAY back when, when news stories were delivered by teletype, I was at a small radio station that was NOT on the air 24x7. The thing is, when you had a contract with AP, they SENT you enough paper to run the teletype 24x7, and they did NOT want it back, and there seemed to be no way to say "Please, do NOT send any paper for the next 6 month contract, we have way too much..." (Let's face it, if you only run 12-14 hours a day, after a year, you almost have a spare years worth of paper)
Well, one day, we wallpapered a hall, and left out magic markers, and told people "Go nuts" - it was the graffiti wall. Took up about 2 cases of paper. We took the OTHER 30 or so cases down to recyling
You boss has probably run into something I've seen way too may times that I'll sum up with a quote:
"There is a huge difference between 10 years of experience, and 1 year of experience ten times"
Unfortunately, there are way way too may programmers out there who hit a certain level of experience (usually around their 2nd or 3rd year), who then never learn anything more - they just do the same thing over and over again
IF you can find a programmer who keeps learning/ improving, a 10 year guys knows a HECK of a lot more than a 2 year guy. I will say, however, that from experience, the curve seems to be asymptotic - there is no way near as much difference between a 5 year guy and a 10 year guy, as a 10 and a 15, or a 15 and a 20 - and yes, I've been doing this for 22 years now
BTW In an accident that bad, MANY times they can tell exactly how fast you were going at impact, without fancy models, etc. I was talking with a guy from NTSB, oh, 15 years ago, and he showed me HOW
The look at your speedometer. In an impact that bad, there is USUALLY enough flex in the needle of the speedo that it TAPS the face of the gage, and usually leaves a small smuge of it's color on the gage - one microphoto, a little bit of expert witness testimony, and you've got the same problem
Hey, I like how my monitor works
OFF - No LED
Standby - Yellow
On, working properly - Green
Not working - RED
RE Encrypting with nothing to hide - yep, I used to do that until friends stopped - I would still prefer to use encrypted mail, and do with the few friends who still do.
Remember that is part of comsec - never let them know what is important. You can even send out RANDOM traffic to random recipients on your list. (or non random, patterned) that might contain nothing but trash, or contain the real message - when you have a real message, you slip it in place of one of the "patterned" messages - Yes, they will know your network, but not when you are talking from person X to Person Y. Or, you use dead drops (say, usegroups) and drop in "trash" once a day in x group - 99.9% of the time, it's nothing. Your contact reads it all the time (and everyone else gets it too) - most times, it's trash, sometimes, it "gold"
I wonder about this one - not that the laws exist, but if the courts would uphold it, and if they did, there are some wonderful ways you can mess with the system.
Let's say you name your kid, Bo3b. The state says "no", and you say, that's his name, and REFUSE to name him something else. What are they going to do? The standard "no name" name for in infant would be Baby "last name", and if the last name is unknown, "Doe"
You just put his name down, every time as Bo3b.... Really, how can they STOP you
I wrote software for a system like this once, but there was a few SLIGHT changes
.com boom)
The company had an OBJECTIVE way to measure the perfomance of each office or unit (proffit/loss - the bottom line) - if you were in a support group, like IS/IT, your departments rating was the SAME as the group(s) you supported - aka, your DEPARTMENTS rating was going to be a 1-5
Now, here's the important part - EVERYONE in the department starts the review off with the AVERAGE review of the department - aka, your department was a 3, everyone starts off at a 3, your department was a 4, everyone starts at a 4!
Your manager could then increase/decrease each person's review by 1 point, however, the AVERAGE of the department could NOT change. So, if you bumped a person UP from, say 3 to 4 (higher was better), you had to DROP someone from a 3 to a 2
Then inside each ranking, you had
1)Job category
and
2)Position in pay scale for that category
You were either "Underpaid", "Average" or "Overpaid" (MY terms, not theirs) Your raise amount differed by which bracket you were in - a 4 who was in the bottom bracket could expect a much better raise than a 4 who was in top bracket. A 2 in the middle or top had better not be expecting a raise - they weren't getting one, where a bottom 2 MIGHT. The 1s? At BEST they were getting warning notes, if not a pink slip
I traveled around the country with the HR folks installing the review database and data. Security was VERY tight. How tight? The server where this would be installed had ALL it's passwords LOCKED OUT, including all Admin passwords, except for MINE, and that was a random password generated at Home office. During the 1-2 days that the database existed on that server, it was NOT backed up, it was NOT in production, it was ONLY on the local segement, and ONLY the managers were allowed on a PC on that segment
It was an "interesting" time - when we walked into the office for "review time" you could SEE the sweat - the GOOD news is that almost all units were 3+. ONCE, and ONLY once did I walk into a field office that was rated a 2, and that was mostly because there were 2 departments that were rated 1 in the building. Let's put it this way - it was NOT pretty for those 2 departments - out of about 20 employees in those departments, I think 5 were left the next day. The FUN days were when you walked into a field office that was a 4 or 5. Those offices 1)Had their act together, and 2)Usually had enough of a clue to KNOW it - there was no sweat, and when we left at the end of 2 days, everyone was happy (10% raises were common for "average paid" line folks (more for lower paid), and this was before the
Actually, it's even more complex that that
OK, as one of the posters said - The "Hydrogen" bomb started off as a "fission/fusion" bomb - with MOST of the yeald being from the fission, believe it ot not. As things progressed, they DID come out with almost pure fusion bombs (only a small kicker to start it) - today, from what I've read, most are "3 stage" - fission/fusion/fission
A few months back, there was the links here to the famous, now declassified paper on "How the atomic bomb works" with DETAILS - like, what shape you make the pit, why most moderen nukes have a mini cyclotron in them, an what the refelectors are. The BIG detail turns out to be "time" - the fact that the xrays, light and particles from the starter fission explosion can get to the other end of the weapon before the pressure wave can, so they can be used to trigger the 2nd and 3rd stage
My first thought was "M-60 Machine Gun" - it's possible to put the bolt carrier in backwards - then you get "click" instead of BANG. From what I understand it finnaly WAS redesigned in a later rev that it could only go together the right way