Wood is a good insulator, while steel conducts. A wood door will resist fire longer than a solid steel door, which will start whatever is on the other side of the door on fire.
This is a know problem with fires on ships. Even a completly gas tight hatch will not prevent the spread of fire.
Paper covered drywall is a great thing to have in a fire. 5/8inch drywall is good for 1 hour in a typical home fire.
There isn't that much paper to burn. The plaster is gypsum (hydrated calcium sulphate), which dosn't burn.
While smoke is always harmful, the smoke from a wood fire is much less harmfull than most other things that burn.
Even if wooden furniture is made of solid wood there is the problem of glues, varnishes and polishes giving off toxic fumes.
Proper construction is much more complex than you realize.
Reinforced concrete is another material which can be troublesome in a fire.
It might be beneficial against HIV, but what if it has side-effects?
Apparently nothing too nasty, since the gene can be found several generations after the "Black Death" ceased to be epidemic.
For example, the gene that helps defend against malaria (and is prevelant amongst many of African origin) is the same gene that causes sickle-cell anaemia. The benefit probably outweighs the problem, but it shouldn't be assumed that there is "better", "worse", "above" and so on.
The interesting thing about this mutation is that it is niether dominant nore recessive with respect to the gene for haemoglobin. The best genome in a Malaria area is one normal haemoglobin gene and one mutant haemoglobin gene. Problem is that a quarter of the offspring of such a population are likely to have two normal haemoglobin genes, making them vulnerable to Malaria and a quarter are likely have two mutant haemoglobin genes, which means that their blood dosn't work very well.
Corporations are licensed legal fictions designed to remove personal liability from the exectives of same.
IIRC the original idea was to encourage investment. By limiting the liability of those investing in a company to the value of their investment. So that if the think collapsed the investors would have worthless pieces of paper, but no liability for any debts.
There is no such thing as international law. I think the recent US actions in Iraq and guantanamo has proved that once and for all. If you have the will and the guns to back them up with then you do whatever you want.
In this case I don't think that even Bush is willing to wage war in South Korea so they could do it.
That might be the quickest way to get a united Korea though. "Samsung nukes Microsoft" would be an interesting headline too.
I'm just wondering when it was in our country, that you gained the Freedom from being Offended?
It isn't even that. Plenty of people are offended by things which are politically correct, hence unlikely to be censored. Then there are people who are offended by censorship.
One thing I just heard on the news today. Some groups, at the LSU campus, are trying to BAN from campus, anyone flying this flag I saw last week up there. It is the old Stars and Bars rebel flag, but, is purple and gold rather than the old colors.
In other words it isn't the "Star and Bars" just something vaguely similar
.Now, I know for some black people, that the old rebel flag is offensive. That's fine. For others, it has no connitation of slavery...just for southern pride. Whatever you think of it....you think it should be banned??
You probably won't find any national flag (including nations which no longer exist) which won't offend someone.
Should we reprint and remove or rewrite politically uncorrect sequences and dialog from Anne Frank, Huck Finn, and Uncle Tom's cabin? I think not. Such revisionism hides whatever insights we might gain into the attitudes and social mores and culture of the time.
So long as the original versions still exist the revised version will probably tell future generations quite about about social mores now. Rewriting existing stories isn't new, even trying to pass off the rewritten version as the original isn't new either. Most of the problems with this happening now are a consquence of overlong copyright terms.
Children aren't free to do whatever they want. They're more or less controlled by their guardian. Do you think the founding fathers passed the bill of rights with children in mind?
The criteria of "child" has varied over time. Thus maybe the question should be along the lines of "Would current High School students be considered children according to the standards of the late 18th century?"
And filament-wound tanks were used for exactly this purpose in the hydrogen powered fuel cell buses that Daimler-Chrysler was testing in Germany. Know where they put them? In the roof, where they felt they were least likely to be ruptured in the event of an accident. But in a passenger car, that's a less than optimal location, and a less than safe assumption.
Actually the roof is probably the safest place to put a hydrogen tank. Hydrogen is lighter than air so there very little possibility of the vehicle (and passengers) winding up in the middle of a pool of burning fuel.
The car, contrary to the Slashdot editor letting this one through when they shouldn't have in its posted form does not make its own fuel. It runs on water and aluminum or magnesium.
Now if it mined those elements and refined them in the process and still had a postive energy output then yes, the article summary would have been accurate.
When it comes to reactive metals getting them into elemental form tends to require a huge input of energy. Frequently these metals are so reactive that chemical reduction won't separate them from any ore, so that instead electrolysis has to be used.
I really find that highly implausible. It's analygous to saying that open source is bad because companies will surely steal the code and take it proprietary in defiance of the license. I'm sure it does happen in open source projects, but to suggest that on balance open source is strengthening the "proprietary" coders at the expense of the open source community is just not true.
If anything proprietary software companies are more likely to pirate other proprietary code. Because there is less chance of their getting caught. Where companies have tried to pirate OSS, e.g. CherryOS, it has become public knowlage quite quickly.
However, one thing is clear: the problem is one of scaling a centralized system. Each patent that comes in requires decoding from legalese, and comparison with every other patent in the system that was ever recorded for prior art.
Actually you'd need to check against every patent application and expired patent. Even then that is not the only possible source of "prior art". The other problems are that what is obvious dosn't tend to get written down and that the same thing might be possible to describe in different ways. (The latter is especially a problem with a dishonest applicant who is deliberatly trying to make something commonplace sound like a new idea.)
Wrong, the reason intellectual property has been recieving a lot more attention is because its the easiest way to milk capital from a technology dependant society without having to actually produce anything. Don't get me wrong, there are some valid legal complaints in the courts but, as most people here have noted over and over again, many of the companies submitting these complaints don't actually produce anything, they simply lay claim to some idea, label it as Intellectual Property, and make plans to profit from the work of others.
If a company decides to persue a business model of persuing other companies for infringing patents it's actually a disadvantage for them to actually produce anything (at least anything related to the patents they hold). Since sooner or later they will try to sue a company capable of countersuing them for patent infringement.
There are a hell of a lot of patents of the form:
1. Take something that people are doing today
2. Insert the word computer
3. File for a patent
4. Profit
The real problem here is that step 4 should be "Get patent rejected". The problem is that too many patents are being issued.
I think that the length granted to a patent should be proportional to the amount of time developing the invention, maybe the patent lasts for twice the invention time with a 10 year cap, that way drugs and small time inventors would probably get the whole 10 years, but Microsoft would only get a couple of weeks for some of it's patents.
Patents are ment to be for innovation which has little to do with "developing an invention", whatever that might mean in some context or other. The problem is that too many obvious patents are issued (as well as quite a few stupid patents). Maybe patent appications need to not only be examined by people "skilled in the art" but also by schoolchildren.
Ring-fencing: This is the creation of a ring of patents around the primary thing you're trying to protect, so that even when the original patent expires, competitors won't be able to reproduce the invention without violating your other patents.
You also have other abuses such as "Evergreening". Which involves filing a variation of a patent about to expire.
The blindingly obvious: RIM's Blackberry troubles stem from patents on the wireless transmission of email. If you're an EE or a CS guy, you'd think "information is information, a channel is a channel, and every combination of information x channel isn't a novel idea waiting to be thought of, it's the obvious thing" but alas, the patent office doesn't see it that way.
Which indicates that the patent examiners arn't competent to do their job. As well as too many patents being granted anyway.
Seriously, every one of the comments above did not mention it. The Space Shuttle is the ONLY way to lift the new sections
The shuttle is hardly the best of cargo lifting mechanisms since any cargo needs to go with a heavy spaceplane. Replace the orbiter with "cargo pod" and it's a lot easier to get bits of the ISS into orbit.
Now as to fragile, it is one of the most stable since it can not blow up. Now, I am sure that somebody is going to mention challenger. The solid booster did NOT blow up. It was the main liquid tank that did due to the O-ring leaking a plume into it. if we had this system in place, the leakage would have meant that those 2 segments would have had a hole and they would have been unuseable. If the hole actually got big enough, it would have meant that the capsule would have been jetisoned for crew ecscape, and everbody lives.
It appears that at least some of the Challenger crew survived the explosion. Had they been in a capsule they would most likely have lived. Since a capsule would have been fitted with a rocket motor to get away from an exploding booster and a parchute to ensure landing at a safe speed.
This would have been a fraction of the costs of the challenger/columbia incidents.
With Columbia the problem was the foam required to insulate the liquid fuel tank falling off. No insulation is required with a solid fuel motor. Also a capsule design tends to put the crew on top of the rocket, thus it's impossible for anything falling off lower down to create a danger.
Except that in real time people are smarter than this. I take my 9 year old down to the mortgage company to sign some papers, they're going to tell me to get stuffed. I take my 9 year old to the auto rental agency to sign the agreement, they're going to tell me to get stuffed.
Though things might get a bit more interesting if the "child" is a teenager. Even then they are likely to ask the "customer" for some from of identity document which includes their date of birth.
One of the problem with EULAs (and other "modern" contracts") is that the licensee and licensor, or their agents, never meet. Otherwise it would be quite obvious it's my 9 year old clicking that "I Agree" button (which the software industry seems to consider more binding than a witnessed signature).
Not only can they not tell if it was your 9 year old (or 9 week old kitten) they also have no way of verifying what was on the screen.
My father-in-law has a portable reel-to-reel tape player, and a portable phonograph, which he and my mother-in-law used to take on picnics. Both are larger than my mid-tower desktop case.:)
"Portable" can refer to very large machines or even buildings. Similarly "self powered" can refer to being hooked into the electrical system of the carrying vehicle or having it's own engine driven generator.
If you let your wife or child use Word on your laptop (second install) than you have violated the EULA.
Unless your family is a corporate entity and that "person" is the owner of the software. Even if your "family business" has violated the EULA (in some way which is actually backed up by the "law of the land") you havn't...
Slashdot Mirror
Clean-room specimens are not so clean anymore once the clean-room has been compromised,
They certainly won't be clean after being exposed to smoke and dirty water...
The explosion was believed to have been caused by a gas leak.
Assuming that this is mains (rather than bottled gas) this would also mean plenty of fuel for a fire. Until someone was able to shut off the supply.
If you think about what kinds of dangerous and obnoxious chemicals they were using in there,
As well as all the perfectly ordinary things which will burn quite well, especially with a methane fueled fire.
Wood is a good insulator, while steel conducts. A wood door will resist fire longer than a solid steel door, which will start whatever is on the other side of the door on fire.
This is a know problem with fires on ships. Even a completly gas tight hatch will not prevent the spread of fire.
Paper covered drywall is a great thing to have in a fire. 5/8inch drywall is good for 1 hour in a typical home fire.
There isn't that much paper to burn. The plaster is gypsum (hydrated calcium sulphate), which dosn't burn.
While smoke is always harmful, the smoke from a wood fire is much less harmfull than most other things that burn.
Even if wooden furniture is made of solid wood there is the problem of glues, varnishes and polishes giving off toxic fumes.
Proper construction is much more complex than you realize.
Reinforced concrete is another material which can be troublesome in a fire.
It might be beneficial against HIV, but what if it has side-effects?
Apparently nothing too nasty, since the gene can be found several generations after the "Black Death" ceased to be epidemic.
For example, the gene that helps defend against malaria (and is prevelant amongst many of African origin) is the same gene that causes sickle-cell anaemia. The benefit probably outweighs the problem, but it shouldn't be assumed that there is "better", "worse", "above" and so on.
The interesting thing about this mutation is that it is niether dominant nore recessive with respect to the gene for haemoglobin. The best genome in a Malaria area is one normal haemoglobin gene and one mutant haemoglobin gene. Problem is that a quarter of the offspring of such a population are likely to have two normal haemoglobin genes, making them vulnerable to Malaria and a quarter are likely have two mutant haemoglobin genes, which means that their blood dosn't work very well.
Corporations are licensed legal fictions designed to remove personal liability from the exectives of same.
IIRC the original idea was to encourage investment. By limiting the liability of those investing in a company to the value of their investment. So that if the think collapsed the investors would have worthless pieces of paper, but no liability for any debts.
There is no such thing as international law. I think the recent US actions in Iraq and guantanamo has proved that once and for all. If you have the will and the guns to back them up with then you do whatever you want.
In this case I don't think that even Bush is willing to wage war in South Korea so they could do it.
That might be the quickest way to get a united Korea though. "Samsung nukes Microsoft" would be an interesting headline too.
Microsoft announces that they have invented Nuclear Weapons.
Will they have an interface called "My WMDs" though?
I'm just wondering when it was in our country, that you gained the Freedom from being Offended?
.Now, I know for some black people, that the old rebel flag is offensive. That's fine. For others, it has no connitation of slavery...just for southern pride. Whatever you think of it....you think it should be banned??
It isn't even that. Plenty of people are offended by things which are politically correct, hence unlikely to be censored. Then there are people who are offended by censorship.
One thing I just heard on the news today. Some groups, at the LSU campus, are trying to BAN from campus, anyone flying this flag I saw last week up there. It is the old Stars and Bars rebel flag, but, is purple and gold rather than the old colors.
In other words it isn't the "Star and Bars" just something vaguely similar
You probably won't find any national flag (including nations which no longer exist) which won't offend someone.
Political correctness is the new McCarthyism.
Except that it isn't exactly a new idea.
The prosecution of thought-crime under the banner of 'diversity'.
In this context the term "diversity" could have been taken from 1984.
Should we reprint and remove or rewrite politically uncorrect sequences and dialog from Anne Frank, Huck Finn, and Uncle Tom's cabin? I think not. Such revisionism hides whatever insights we might gain into the attitudes and social mores and culture of the time.
So long as the original versions still exist the revised version will probably tell future generations quite about about social mores now.
Rewriting existing stories isn't new, even trying to pass off the rewritten version as the original isn't new either. Most of the problems with this happening now are a consquence of overlong copyright terms.
Children aren't free to do whatever they want. They're more or less controlled by their guardian. Do you think the founding fathers passed the bill of rights with children in mind?
The criteria of "child" has varied over time. Thus maybe the question should be along the lines of "Would current High School students be considered children according to the standards of the late 18th century?"
And filament-wound tanks were used for exactly this purpose in the hydrogen powered fuel cell buses that Daimler-Chrysler was testing in Germany. Know where they put them? In the roof, where they felt they were least likely to be ruptured in the event of an accident. But in a passenger car, that's a less than optimal location, and a less than safe assumption.
Actually the roof is probably the safest place to put a hydrogen tank. Hydrogen is lighter than air so there very little possibility of the vehicle (and passengers) winding up in the middle of a pool of burning fuel.
The car, contrary to the Slashdot editor letting this one through when they shouldn't have in its posted form does not make its own fuel. It runs on water and aluminum or magnesium.
Now if it mined those elements and refined them in the process and still had a postive energy output then yes, the article summary would have been accurate.
When it comes to reactive metals getting them into elemental form tends to require a huge input of energy. Frequently these metals are so reactive that chemical reduction won't separate them from any ore, so that instead electrolysis has to be used.
Anybody want to venture the supply problems of supplying about 100 Lbs of magnesium wire per commuter per week.
As well as getting rid of a quantity of metal oxide...
The article seems to claim it won't cost more than petrol. Petrol is delivered by pipeline or tanker. Pumps and hoses won't deliver the wire.
On the other hand you can pump (and bottle) gasses, including hydrogen.
I really find that highly implausible. It's analygous to saying that open source is bad because companies will surely steal the code and take it proprietary in defiance of the license. I'm sure it does happen in open source projects, but to suggest that on balance open source is strengthening the "proprietary" coders at the expense of the open source community is just not true.
If anything proprietary software companies are more likely to pirate other proprietary code. Because there is less chance of their getting caught. Where companies have tried to pirate OSS, e.g. CherryOS, it has become public knowlage quite quickly.
However, one thing is clear: the problem is one of scaling a centralized system. Each patent that comes in requires decoding from legalese, and comparison with every other patent in the system that was ever recorded for prior art.
Actually you'd need to check against every patent application and expired patent. Even then that is not the only possible source of "prior art".
The other problems are that what is obvious dosn't tend to get written down and that the same thing might be possible to describe in different ways. (The latter is especially a problem with a dishonest applicant who is deliberatly trying to make something commonplace sound like a new idea.)
Wrong, the reason intellectual property has been recieving a lot more attention is because its the easiest way to milk capital from a technology dependant society without having to actually produce anything. Don't get me wrong, there are some valid legal complaints in the courts but, as most people here have noted over and over again, many of the companies submitting these complaints don't actually produce anything, they simply lay claim to some idea, label it as Intellectual Property, and make plans to profit from the work of others.
If a company decides to persue a business model of persuing other companies for infringing patents it's actually a disadvantage for them to actually produce anything (at least anything related to the patents they hold). Since sooner or later they will try to sue a company capable of countersuing them for patent infringement.
There are a hell of a lot of patents of the form:
1. Take something that people are doing today
2. Insert the word computer
3. File for a patent
4. Profit
The real problem here is that step 4 should be "Get patent rejected". The problem is that too many patents are being issued.
I think that the length granted to a patent should be proportional to the amount of time developing the invention, maybe the patent lasts for twice the invention time with a 10 year cap, that way drugs and small time inventors would probably get the whole 10 years, but Microsoft would only get a couple of weeks for some of it's patents.
Patents are ment to be for innovation which has little to do with "developing an invention", whatever that might mean in some context or other.
The problem is that too many obvious patents are issued (as well as quite a few stupid patents). Maybe patent appications need to not only be examined by people "skilled in the art" but also by schoolchildren.
Ring-fencing: This is the creation of a ring of patents around the primary thing you're trying to protect, so that even when the original patent expires, competitors won't be able to reproduce the invention without violating your other patents.
You also have other abuses such as "Evergreening". Which involves filing a variation of a patent about to expire.
The blindingly obvious: RIM's Blackberry troubles stem from patents on the wireless transmission of email. If you're an EE or a CS guy, you'd think "information is information, a channel is a channel, and every combination of information x channel isn't a novel idea waiting to be thought of, it's the obvious thing" but alas, the patent office doesn't see it that way.
Which indicates that the patent examiners arn't competent to do their job. As well as too many patents being granted anyway.
Seriously, every one of the comments above did not mention it. The Space Shuttle is the ONLY way to lift the new sections
The shuttle is hardly the best of cargo lifting mechanisms since any cargo needs to go with a heavy spaceplane. Replace the orbiter with "cargo pod" and it's a lot easier to get bits of the ISS into orbit.
Now as to fragile, it is one of the most stable since it can not blow up. Now, I am sure that somebody is going to mention challenger. The solid booster did NOT blow up. It was the main liquid tank that did due to the O-ring leaking a plume into it. if we had this system in place, the leakage would have meant that those 2 segments would have had a hole and they would have been unuseable. If the hole actually got big enough, it would have meant that the capsule would have been jetisoned for crew ecscape, and everbody lives.
It appears that at least some of the Challenger crew survived the explosion. Had they been in a capsule they would most likely have lived. Since a capsule would have been fitted with a rocket motor to get away from an exploding booster and a parchute to ensure landing at a safe speed.
This would have been a fraction of the costs of the challenger/columbia incidents.
With Columbia the problem was the foam required to insulate the liquid fuel tank falling off. No insulation is required with a solid fuel motor. Also a capsule design tends to put the crew on top of the rocket, thus it's impossible for anything falling off lower down to create a danger.
Except that in real time people are smarter than this. I take my 9 year old down to the mortgage company to sign some papers, they're going to tell me to get stuffed. I take my 9 year old to the auto rental agency to sign the agreement, they're going to tell me to get stuffed.
Though things might get a bit more interesting if the "child" is a teenager. Even then they are likely to ask the "customer" for some from of identity document which includes their date of birth.
One of the problem with EULAs (and other "modern" contracts") is that the licensee and licensor, or their agents, never meet. Otherwise it would be quite obvious it's my 9 year old clicking that "I Agree" button (which the software industry seems to consider more binding than a witnessed signature).
Not only can they not tell if it was your 9 year old (or 9 week old kitten) they also have no way of verifying what was on the screen.
My father-in-law has a portable reel-to-reel tape player, and a portable phonograph, which he and my mother-in-law used to take on picnics. Both are larger than my mid-tower desktop case. :)
"Portable" can refer to very large machines or even buildings. Similarly "self powered" can refer to being hooked into the electrical system of the carrying vehicle or having it's own engine driven generator.
I have a carrying strap for my desktop, it's portable. Actually, most systems are portable, as in not bolted to the floor.
Bolting something to the floor dosn't stop it being portable. If the floor is that of a bus, caravan, truck, etc.
If you let your wife or child use Word on your laptop (second install) than you have violated the EULA.
Unless your family is a corporate entity and that "person" is the owner of the software. Even if your "family business" has violated the EULA (in some way which is actually backed up by the "law of the land") you havn't...