Some oversimplified philosphy, some good hints. Programmers and SysAdmins who do a lot of resource management eventually become managers. This isn't neccessarily a bad thing, as the world needs more managers with extensive experience with that which they are managing, and the respect of those people they are managing. It's true that it's silly to adopt some software, technology or process just because it's new. But Ted seems to be resistant to any change, which is not good either. The problem with "don't fix it if it ain't broke" reasoning is..what do you do when it eventually breaks? This is a mistake made by many in process control / automation eniveronments: failure of a part which is so obsolete that it has become difficult and expensive to obtain a replacement. Just try to find a new motherboard with an ISA bus these days. Or a composite monitor. The same thing can happen with software and the OS..where are you going to find a guy who knows enough about that old Kaypro which was running some COBOL software on CP/M, which controlled the electroplating machinery? This is why companies have lifecycle management, so that the pain of switching to newer software / hardware comes with predictable cost and timetables instead of sudden, possibly prolonged unavailability and expensive, awkward, band-aid fixes.
This flows into the idea of organizational amnesia, where important processes become lost. This is perhaps best illustrated by the US DoE forgetting how to make this secret substance called FOGBANK, which is a critical component of H-bombs. Upper management felt as though, because there was no need for additional H-bombs, the process was unimportant, and didn't take into account that H-bombs become (more) dangerous with advancing age, and eventually these needed to be replaced. It took considerable time and money to re-engineer FOGBANK.
These are both examples of failure to consider that all equipment wears out, and failure to plan for long-term needs.
nt. Guruplug and sheevaplug have availability problems. Pogoplug seems to be barely existant, with no technical data on their web page and nothing that indicates it is linux-friendly or hacker-friendly. This 'plug-computer' industry needs to mature in order to replace the mini-servers I am using.
After I had posted, it occured to me that the cost and complexity of what I had opposed makes it inappropriate for a non radiophile. So, you're right, a SPOT device and perhaps a cheap, lightweight HT would be more appropriate. I think that perhaps why I posted all of this is because I have recently bought the FT-817, and am urgently awaiting its delivery in the middle of next week, with an eye towards hitting the trail and doing some portable hamming as I make occasional stops along the way (Do I measure the number of miles I spend on the rail as 'hamming distance'?)
I find it distressing that so many posters here have talked about VHF/UHF only, and in relation to repeaters. There's more to ham radio than that, there's more to portable ham radio than that. The satellite option was at least interesting. The antennas don't have to be large (look up arrow antenna), the problem is calculating where the satellite will be and when, and then getting through the massive amounts of traffic on said satellite.
Repeaters are great, but they only work when you're in range. If you're going to be in the rockies, there will be a lot of times when mountains will block reception. When on hilltops, you may get TOO MUCH reception, from far away, that makes it difficult to use the one repeater you're trying to.
If you buy a more expensive HF rig, you can get communication even from down in a ditch. Usually, HF communication uses large antennas and the curvature of the earth makes the signal bounce off a layer of the ionosphere far away, and because of the angle, land even farther than that, sometimes bouncing off the earth back to the atmosphere, etc. But the problem with this is it tends to be unpredictable. There are predictions that can be made, but they're only general. A bigger problem, for the backpacker, is that these signals are almost always far away. the NVIS method, "Near Vertical Incidence Skyway", involved signals that go nearly straight up to the ionosphere, and then almost straight back down again. The result is hopping over mountains and fairly predictable communication with low interference. An advantage is that the antenna doesn't have to be high off the ground, in fact it's REQUIRED to be close to the ground...but stretch out horizontablly, not vertical like a walkie-talkie antenna. As the antennas tend to be larger for the HF band, you'd have to make camp and set up your hunk of wire a few feet above the ground before getting on the air. There are other issues with NVIS, the only one of importance being that the frequency which you tune to, in order to facilitate communications, varies throughout that day. But it does so in a predicatable manner.
If you get the Yaesu FT-817, you get a small radio that's just a little bigger than a walkie-talkie, that covers both HF bands, VHF, and UHF...so you can use repeaters or NVIS as available. The battery and charger than come with the FT-817 are crappy, go for the aftermarket W4RT produced models. There's an aftermarket antenna called "Miracle Whip", that is much better than the antenna included with the unit, is small and easy to use. You might also want to buy a portable solar panel. The ones made by Brunton are nice. Get the 12 Watt version, the six watt one isn't enough to charge your radio quickly.
Last piece of advice: don't just wait until you're out in the field to get familiar with the equipment. Get practice using it, with all its accessories in various configurations, BEFORE you go camping. It will be well worth the practice.
FT-817, W4RT battery, charger, Miracle Whip, solar panel -- package can be acquired for under $1000 (much less, in my case).
If you need something to CYA, then get someone with a certificate. If you got hired because of certificates, then hire someone with a certificate. But make sure they don't have one as good as you or better.
In larger organizations with HR departments, one needs a token to pass the hire-wall. That token is a certification, or a degree. In places where department heads do the screening of resumes, a cert is not so important. But the hotjobs-craigslist jobvertising trend has made it so any decent position will inundate the hiring person with tons of resumes, most of them not even remotely suited for the position. Back when people had to buy a stamp and mail a resume, they were more thoughtful about where they applied and there was less of the hiring person's time wasted.
Perhaps what is needed in this day and age is exactly that: advertise, but tell people to snail-mail their resumes in. Sure, postage is a small cost for someone who is even remotely serious but those who consider it a 'long-shot' won't bother.
Yes you see I've already got one. The flying, though, isn't the difficult part. It's the landing that's a bitch. Gravity sucks. Quick change of inertia sucks more.
Iceland had wanted to join the EU. But I guess this puts an end to these plans. Well, Iceland isn't in Europe anyhow, and much of the EU seems to be having a lot of problems similar to what Iceland has been having as of late. The question then becomes, what economic value is being a 'data haven' going to bring, and how serious are they? The economic benefits only accrue when there is significant 'hosting' regulations around the world, particularly in well-off countries (which their are), and not much or not very effective 'browsing' regulations (the efficiency of existing 'great walls' can be debated). A bigger problem comes when the country becomes PRIMARILY a data haven - at that point, major censor powers will find it easy and effective to just blacklist all of the data haven's IP addresses / ASNs. This does not cut all traffic from country A (say, for instance, Pakistan) to country B (Iceland), but cuts off access to the unsophisticated Internet user, greatly lowering the economic value of being a data haven. But this may be overcome by having mirror sites and anonymizing proxies all over the world, with Iceland becoming a 'legal black hole' for subpoenas and the like.
There's an ugly side of being a data haven, beyond the normally expected ones, and that is being a spam haven. This may be where Iceland makes a lot of its money in this scheme. But the liberty afforded by their plan is so great, that spam is a minor price to pay. If they're serious, I congratulate them. If they're not, then shame on them.
Mortar that's too strong is brittle, meaning it can easily crack. Rebar can rust and swell, breaking this brittle cement. The result is catastrophic. I learned this from a couple of masons who I was drinking with at a pub. They joke that because of some really bad decisions made by architects and structural engineers in the 1960s and 1970s, they have good job security. I had known from reading books on restoring historical masonry buildings (thanks Ian Cramb) that strong mortar such as portland cement and other more modern mixes are just too brittle to be used as mortar. Stones and bricks shift ever so slightly as they settle. This can cause cracks, large or small, in the brittle mortar, that wouldn't happen with a weak lime mortar. These cracks are the widened by water freezing and thawing, and sometimes plant life. But what my bar buddies told me is that what makes the problem even worse is the rebar used in concrete buildings until recently would slowly rust and swell, so the masonry would burst from the inside because it was so brittle. These mason fellows would chip out the remaining concrete or cement, clean and coat the rebar (but sometimes replacing it) with a protecting paint, and then re-apply cement or concrete. I've noticed this problem occuring in many places, such as subway stations and bridges in the Boston area. I have no reason to believe the problem is limited to this city.
Regarding Roman cements and concrete: pozzolana, otherwise known as hydraulic cement, was a mixture containing volcanic ash, specifically from mount Vensuvius. It has the ability to dry and set underwater. This 'secret' is said by many to have been lost for many centuries, but in fact was kept a 'masonic secret' by some masonic guilds for a long time. Yet the exact nature of this secret and its revelation are hazy.
Yes, blood was used as an ad-mixture to some Roman cements. I can't remember what benefit it added.
Some places add organic material to concrete, with a variety of results. Done correctly, it increases the strength of concrete. Done badly, it's a recepie for disaster. Using straw is certainly bad, but evidently hemp and possibly other materials can be used. Exactly what works under given conditions is not known to me. It may be another one of the 'masonic' secrets.
I HAVE tried it, as much as I have claimed to. I have used said plastic tubing with the actual Botryococcus braunii I described. Why hasn't my plan taken over the world? Well, I just did a pilot project on my back porch, because I live in the city. I am not a 'professional microbiologist', and there's no money to be made in supporting my research, so I haven't had anyone fund me to expand this beyond the pilot project stage. The amount of oil I extracted was fairly small, but I was using air as a carbon dioxide source, which is hardly 'concentrated', even in the city.
As far as the use of glass: I investigated this possibility. Glass is more expensive, heavier, fragile, and harder to get. I don't think of it as any more 'eco-friendly', because the production of glass still requires a lot of (heat) energy, most of which will come from petroleum. What, you say, there's no silicon shortage but there is of plastic...well, not really. Plastic does now come from petroleum, but the whole point of Botryococcus braunii is it creates hydrocarbons which are useful, and can potentially be reformed into plastics. Yes, we are still far away from doing this, but it does not negate the idea that it is possible, even likely, in the future.
If someone wants to fund a computer guy, with out 'credentials' in microbiology or organic chemistry, to turn my experiments into an actual, working plant to abate carbon emissions while creating a usable fuel, I'd be very happy. But it's not likely to happen, which is why I am very open about the idea - I am hoping that others can take it and do something with it. Yes, it would be nice if I made some money out of it, but I don't plan on doing so. I have various projects in computer networking and computer security which are more likely to make me money, and are within my area of expertise. These are what I am pinning my hopes on, to make a decent wage.
The problem is that these researchers all want to come up with some invention that they can patent and make a fortune. But the process is really to simple for such an approach. Gradual refinement is what is needed. Here's how to do it: Botryococcus braunii (Bb) is a microalgae which produces a gooey oil outside the cell, comprising up to 83% of its total weight. Because it is outside the cell, the organism does not have to be killed in order for the product to be extracted. This makes up for its growth rate being slower than that of other microalgae, something which is lost on some of these alt-fuel schemesters. The oil it produces can be directly refined into alkanes such as octane (gasoline) and various jet fuels.
Here's how to do it: take as rich of a carbon dioxide source as you can get (but at some point it can be too rich), such as a coal burning power plant, a brewery, or Chicago politician. Hook this up to a tubular photobioreactor of some significant length, so that process can be continuous. When the algal cells have reached some level of oil generation, strip the oil off with a solvent, preferably hexane. Use of the appropriate solvent will not kill the majority of the algae (sheep to be shorn). Cycle the naked algae back to the input of the carbon dioxide source.
A photobioreactor can be made on the cheap. Use tubular plastic sections of good transparency, such as the protectors made for long flourescent tubes, and hook them together with elbows of common plastic plumbing. Suspend these a few inches above a reflective surface. I think it may be possible to take surplus aluminum siding and polish the underside of it. I think you could even use wire coathangers as supports if you didn't have anything better.
The point is, that it's not important to be particularly efficient if you can do it on a large scale, cheaply. Over time, more productive strains of algae can be bred or engineered.
For more information, see the Botryococcus braunii entry on wikipedia.
This planet is too big, too close to its Sun, and orbiting too fast to be habitable in any way we are accustomed too. But this doesn't mean its discovery is not news: Astronomers are finding more evidence that planets are common. Progress is being made towards discovering planets more like our own than the gas giants which were first discovered.
What is needed is more telescopes of good sensitivity. Each main sequence star not wholly unlike our own needs to be carefully monitored over time, in order to detect planetary crossings, and then focus the best telescopes on the most promising stars.
In which sense do you mean 'MODERATION'? As in restraint, i.e. "Use moderation in all things, including moderation". Or, do you mean, the actions of the slashdot moderation system of article prioritization?
Neither does then Penguinista Republic, and the other nations of the far southern hemisphere. But talk is cheap and land is available so these countries let the Northerners make a lot of noise and build their huts because it's too much bother to throw snowballs at them. There are limits to the tolerance that the Southern Nations has shown, so don't press your luck. In fact, the amount of fish the North is taking from Southern waters is a bit high and needs to be reduced. But go ahead, build your telescope.
I wonder about the utility of this telescope. It is claimed that the images obtained will be 'almost as good as' those from Hubble. Perhaps during most of the year, but during Antarctic summer, the sun shines the whole day, so the telescope will be useless a great portion of the time. Or, maybe it's not simply an optical telescope? In either case, the cost of building and maintaining such an observatory are high. If it is to be manned, higher still. If it is build on the ice pack, it had better generate very little heat, or it will sink just like so many Antarctic bases.
How, I realize that it is difficult to get time on the really good telescopes around the world, and in space. So, perhaps this 'less than Hubble' is still practical. I just wish we had the money to build more space telescopes. particularly deep space ones, away from the solar wind.
If you spot reading slashdot, you might find the time and focus to finish your dissertation. Seriously, reading Slashdot too much serves to create an Attention Defecit Disorder. Now if....whoo what's that! I found another open wifi network!...now where was I? Yea...Slashdot is like a bazaar of ideas, but you just went out for milk and bread.
This machine has too many 'improvements' for me to feel like it is an honest replica. Nonetheless, I like the idea. I might get one. I still have my Apple ][+, with the books, green composite monitor, cards including an Apple Cat 212 modem.
I also have some old, 1977 original apple program cassettes. It would be kind of cool to run those on a replica Apple.
Of all the apple books, my favorite was "Beneath Apple DOS", which was enough documentation for me to screw around with DOS 3.3 enough to do some wicked cool things, even crack copy protection.
I agree.. For many years I had a very fast web site because everything was done in text. Now there's some graphics, but it still loads pretty fast. The problem is, there's all these new inventions, loading content that is not static, but computed, from a wide number of sites, each with several DNS lookups (multiple dns lookups slow down site view immensely). Too many web designers are paid by the hour, and tell their clients that they need to look 'modern' with whatever gadgets and eye candy is out there. Macromedia Flash is the best example of this. Any web site which is primarily informational should be easy to view on a P2-500 with 128mb of ram and a 192k net connection, or less. It's time the Internet went on a diet.
You kids don't know what it was like, accessing the Internet, when it was called the Arpanet, at 300 baud with 48k of ram and no web. We had other ways of organizing data these days, and we liked it, because we looked like wizards to the rest of the muggles. Best of all, no ads!
It doesn't matter too much how efficient a power source is, as long as the fuel is plentiful. For instance, if you have a REAL LOT of petrochemicals it doesn't really matter how much you have to use to get to mars, etc. BUT more important is how DENSE the energy source is...i.e, how much more of the fuel does it take to move the fuel that is going to be used later on. This gets to be a BIG PROBLEM with chemical fuels, as even at their best they are not very DENSE. Of course, efficiency helps. But say, for a moment, that you have a nice large nuclear power plant on earth...you could probably use all that heat to either directly or indirectly (though electricity) create some high-density chemical fuels...but there's a limit to how much power a chemical fuel can provide. We need NUCLEAR FUEL, be it fission or fusion, or even better ANTIMATTER fuel. While some people claim that nuclear fuel is too dangerous to use on earth, I disagree. But I do think that antimatter is too dangerous to be used anywhere in the vicinity of important and/or massive objects (can't have the earth or space station pummeled by shrapnel in the case of an antimatter explosion, can we? And remember, there's no air friction to slow this shrapnel down). So, the best advice is to use fission, or hopefully fusion once technology gives up on the silly Tokamak idea, to leave earth's gravity well and move far enough out of the plane to be safe, and then use antimatter to the long haul. What, you say antimatter is too expensive? That's only because you've picked the wrong places to manufacture it. Production using solar power in CLOSE SOLAR ORBIT, in a thousand factories, should make antimatter cheap enough. You just have to go fetch it from close-solar orbits, which can be robotically done using the antimatter as fuel itself! The factories themselves can be replicaed using easily available materials from the moon or asteroids, and then replicated in close solar orbit using the vast energy resouces of the sun.
So to sum up, the problem isn't the amount of energy required, but the location of that energy. Move our energy conversion devices closer to the source, and we'll have plnety of consumable energy, even if it has to go through several intermediate storage mechanisms to become safe and easily accessible.
And yes, I've said this in other places, over time. I just hope that I get through to someone who is charged with long-term planning for space exploration.
This topic is important for me, as this planet isn't big enough for me and You.
So, how to deal with space junk of one type or another? The first problem is detection. The faster your trael, the more difficult it is to detect and react quickly enough. This limits us to less than half-light speed, because the best we can do is to use radio or light to broadcast and have time to reflect back to us (taking into account various doppler shifts), some processing time, and then enough time to perform a countermeasure. Due to the fact that our interstellar ship are most likely to be large (because they are packing a lot of fuel, plus the million tons or so of cargo and personnell needed to form a new colony), and that large objects are more likely to have been found in advance (if not by stationary telescopes in the Solar system, then by advance detection of the travelling ship), the small 'dust' is more likely to be a problem. The solution is to funnel these down the central, hollow core of our interstellar space-ship and to use them as reaction mass, i.e. we make them flow around us and then push on them...sorta like a boat? Do this by electromagnetic means (yeah you might think that only iron, nickel, and cobalt repond to magnetic fields - but the truth is that all matter does, but that those three aformentioned elements are most easily effected, which stuff like hydrogen and belly-button lint are less so.)
Anyhow I have started a blog on this type of stuff, of which I am dangerously educated (enough to be dangerous), http://realisticinterstellartravel.blogspot.com.
If my logic seems a little fuzzy it's because I am a little fuzzy, after six Sierra Nevada Pale Ales. If anyone wants to discuss this more, I suggest a drinking tour of Cambridge, from the Thirsty Ear, to the Queen's Head Pub: "In vino veritas" but I will substitute beer for wine, because I am a northern European.
Cadmium is one of the "toxic heavy metals" {insert music pun here} and because of this, no matter what amount is used and to any degree of value, it will be shot down by the enviro-namby-pambys who took lead outta my solder.
If you commute from NH, you get to pay the very high NH property taxes (because property taxes are the primary source of state revenue, as there is no income or sales tax), but if your employer is in mass, you get to pay the high Mass income tax. Wow! the joy of double taxation?
I was born in Boston of Boston heritage, but grew up in western Mass, only to move back to Boston as an adult. I have very mixed feelings about the city. It's not a place to pick a well-paying IT job...as long as you have a prestigious degree. The place has a surplus of Harvard/MIT/BU/etc. students and grads. Housing here is not cheap, but many of the buildings are strong and with character, so much unlike other tech hot-spots. There is public transit, and it does work, but is really only viable for night-time transit along the major subway/streetcar lines. The bus system SUCKS, but much of that has to do with the drivers here, who are so aggressive as to make road rage a serious problem.
The weather here is always pretty humid, so when it gets hot in the summer its nasty. In the winter, daytime temperature rises just enough above freezing to melt the snow a little bit, and then at night drop below freezing and you get ICE. Lots of it! I miss living outside the city where the snow comes just after thanksgiving and stays until just before Easter, and doesn't really get that freeze/thaw thing going on. We have beaches (fresh and salt water) you can actually swim and boat at (the water pollution has declined dramatically), and some of the ones further away from the city aren't too crowded.
Probably the more anger-provoking thing that happens to you here can be avoided by just avoiding the newspapers and having as little to do with government as possible. From the state capital down to the town halls, they're corrupt and see their jobs as saying "no" unless you give them a big, personal reason to say "yes". It's funny how used to encountering assholes in government offices I've become, that when I was in upstate NY I had some bureaucrats actually trying to help me rather than stymie me. It was refreshing.
As far as sports go, I HATE SPORTS..I hate Bosox fans the worst. When they 'reversed the curse', the street were raucus and that was something to see, but the townie contingent with their baseball caps just drive me away from places like Dedham.
Right about now is when you can expect the weather to start getting hot around here, and ugly. but it's been unseasonably Seattle-like for the past few days, and I have no complaints.
Oh, as far as the age of the city, by US standards it is very old. By European standards not so much. but the average age of architecture in the city and immediate suburbs is probably about 110, which puts in on par with a lot of European cities I've seen. The oldest building in the area was built in 1636 (actually oldest building in English America), and is pretty much the same now as when it was built. Buildings start to be considered historically 'old' if they were built before 1800. It's not that hard to buy a house built in 1780 or so in rural areas.
New England has some of the most beautiful countryside I have ever seen, and lots of woods and very climbable mountains. If you pick the right time to drive out of the city, you can be there in twenty minutes.
For the record, I will jump in glee when Ted Kennedy dies. Which undoubtably, is the only way he'll ever leave office.
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I've got an unused class B (65535 addresses). I want to make money using it. So, I am against IPv6.
Some oversimplified philosphy, some good hints. Programmers and SysAdmins who do a lot of resource management eventually become managers. This isn't neccessarily a bad thing, as the world needs more managers with extensive experience with that which they are managing, and the respect of those people they are managing. It's true that it's silly to adopt some software, technology or process just because it's new. But Ted seems to be resistant to any change, which is not good either. The problem with "don't fix it if it ain't broke" reasoning is..what do you do when it eventually breaks? This is a mistake made by many in process control / automation eniveronments: failure of a part which is so obsolete that it has become difficult and expensive to obtain a replacement. Just try to find a new motherboard with an ISA bus these days. Or a composite monitor. The same thing can happen with software and the OS..where are you going to find a guy who knows enough about that old Kaypro which was running some COBOL software on CP/M, which controlled the electroplating machinery? This is why companies have lifecycle management, so that the pain of switching to newer software / hardware comes with predictable cost and timetables instead of sudden, possibly prolonged unavailability and expensive, awkward, band-aid fixes.
This flows into the idea of organizational amnesia, where important processes become lost. This is perhaps best illustrated by the US DoE forgetting how to make this secret substance called FOGBANK, which is a critical component of H-bombs. Upper management felt as though, because there was no need for additional H-bombs, the process was unimportant, and didn't take into account that H-bombs become (more) dangerous with advancing age, and eventually these needed to be replaced. It took considerable time and money to re-engineer FOGBANK.
These are both examples of failure to consider that all equipment wears out, and failure to plan for long-term needs.
nt. Guruplug and sheevaplug have availability problems. Pogoplug seems to be barely existant, with no technical data on their web page and nothing that indicates it is linux-friendly or hacker-friendly. This 'plug-computer' industry needs to mature in order to replace the mini-servers I am using.
After I had posted, it occured to me that the cost and complexity of what I had opposed makes it inappropriate for a non radiophile. So, you're right, a SPOT device and perhaps a cheap, lightweight HT would be more appropriate. I think that perhaps why I posted all of this is because I have recently bought the FT-817, and am urgently awaiting its delivery in the middle of next week, with an eye towards hitting the trail and doing some portable hamming as I make occasional stops along the way (Do I measure the number of miles I spend on the rail as 'hamming distance'?)
I find it distressing that so many posters here have talked about VHF/UHF only, and in relation to repeaters. There's more to ham radio than that, there's more to portable ham radio than that. The satellite option was at least interesting. The antennas don't have to be large (look up arrow antenna), the problem is calculating where the satellite will be and when, and then getting through the massive amounts of traffic on said satellite.
Repeaters are great, but they only work when you're in range. If you're going to be in the rockies, there will be a lot of times when mountains will block reception. When on hilltops, you may get TOO MUCH reception, from far away, that makes it difficult to use the one repeater you're trying to.
If you buy a more expensive HF rig, you can get communication even from down in a ditch. Usually, HF communication uses large antennas and the curvature of the earth makes the signal bounce off a layer of the ionosphere far away, and because of the angle, land even farther than that, sometimes bouncing off the earth back to the atmosphere, etc. But the problem with this is it tends to be unpredictable. There are predictions that can be made, but they're only general. A bigger problem, for the backpacker, is that these signals are almost always far away. the NVIS method, "Near Vertical Incidence Skyway", involved signals that go nearly straight up to the ionosphere, and then almost straight back down again. The result is hopping over mountains and fairly predictable communication with low interference. An advantage is that the antenna doesn't have to be high off the ground, in fact it's REQUIRED to be close to the ground...but stretch out horizontablly, not vertical like a walkie-talkie antenna. As the antennas tend to be larger for the HF band, you'd have to make camp and set up your hunk of wire a few feet above the ground before getting on the air. There are other issues with NVIS, the only one of importance being that the frequency which you tune to, in order to facilitate communications, varies throughout that day. But it does so in a predicatable manner.
If you get the Yaesu FT-817, you get a small radio that's just a little bigger than a walkie-talkie, that covers both HF bands, VHF, and UHF...so you can use repeaters or NVIS as available. The battery and charger than come with the FT-817 are crappy, go for the aftermarket W4RT produced models. There's an aftermarket antenna called "Miracle Whip", that is much better than the antenna included with the unit, is small and easy to use. You might also want to buy a portable solar panel. The ones made by Brunton are nice. Get the 12 Watt version, the six watt one isn't enough to charge your radio quickly.
Last piece of advice: don't just wait until you're out in the field to get familiar with the equipment. Get practice using it, with all its accessories in various configurations, BEFORE you go camping. It will be well worth the practice.
FT-817, W4RT battery, charger, Miracle Whip, solar panel -- package can be acquired for under $1000 (much less, in my case).
If you need something to CYA, then get someone with a certificate. If you got hired because of certificates, then hire someone with a certificate. But make sure they don't have one as good as you or better.
In larger organizations with HR departments, one needs a token to pass the hire-wall. That token is a certification, or a degree. In places where department heads do the screening of resumes, a cert is not so important. But the hotjobs-craigslist jobvertising trend has made it so any decent position will inundate the hiring person with tons of resumes, most of them not even remotely suited for the position. Back when people had to buy a stamp and mail a resume, they were more thoughtful about where they applied and there was less of the hiring person's time wasted.
Perhaps what is needed in this day and age is exactly that: advertise, but tell people to snail-mail their resumes in. Sure, postage is a small cost for someone who is even remotely serious but those who consider it a 'long-shot' won't bother.
Yes you see I've already got one. The flying, though, isn't the difficult part. It's the landing that's a bitch. Gravity sucks. Quick change of inertia sucks more.
Iceland had wanted to join the EU. But I guess this puts an end to these plans. Well, Iceland isn't in Europe anyhow, and much of the EU seems to be having a lot of problems similar to what Iceland has been having as of late. The question then becomes, what economic value is being a 'data haven' going to bring, and how serious are they? The economic benefits only accrue when there is significant 'hosting' regulations around the world, particularly in well-off countries (which their are), and not much or not very effective 'browsing' regulations (the efficiency of existing 'great walls' can be debated). A bigger problem comes when the country becomes PRIMARILY a data haven - at that point, major censor powers will find it easy and effective to just blacklist all of the data haven's IP addresses / ASNs. This does not cut all traffic from country A (say, for instance, Pakistan) to country B (Iceland), but cuts off access to the unsophisticated Internet user, greatly lowering the economic value of being a data haven. But this may be overcome by having mirror sites and anonymizing proxies all over the world, with Iceland becoming a 'legal black hole' for subpoenas and the like.
There's an ugly side of being a data haven, beyond the normally expected ones, and that is being a spam haven. This may be where Iceland makes a lot of its money in this scheme. But the liberty afforded by their plan is so great, that spam is a minor price to pay. If they're serious, I congratulate them. If they're not, then shame on them.
...and Nordic countries?
Mortar that's too strong is brittle, meaning it can easily crack. Rebar can rust and swell, breaking this brittle cement. The result is catastrophic. I learned this from a couple of masons who I was drinking with at a pub. They joke that because of some really bad decisions made by architects and structural engineers in the 1960s and 1970s, they have good job security. I had known from reading books on restoring historical masonry buildings (thanks Ian Cramb) that strong mortar such as portland cement and other more modern mixes are just too brittle to be used as mortar. Stones and bricks shift ever so slightly as they settle. This can cause cracks, large or small, in the brittle mortar, that wouldn't happen with a weak lime mortar. These cracks are the widened by water freezing and thawing, and sometimes plant life. But what my bar buddies told me is that what makes the problem even worse is the rebar used in concrete buildings until recently would slowly rust and swell, so the masonry would burst from the inside because it was so brittle. These mason fellows would chip out the remaining concrete or cement, clean and coat the rebar (but sometimes replacing it) with a protecting paint, and then re-apply cement or concrete. I've noticed this problem occuring in many places, such as subway stations and bridges in the Boston area. I have no reason to believe the problem is limited to this city.
Regarding Roman cements and concrete: pozzolana, otherwise known as hydraulic cement, was a mixture containing volcanic ash, specifically from mount Vensuvius. It has the ability to dry and set underwater. This 'secret' is said by many to have been lost for many centuries, but in fact was kept a 'masonic secret' by some masonic guilds for a long time. Yet the exact nature of this secret and its revelation are hazy.
Yes, blood was used as an ad-mixture to some Roman cements. I can't remember what benefit it added.
Some places add organic material to concrete, with a variety of results. Done correctly, it increases the strength of concrete. Done badly, it's a recepie for disaster. Using straw is certainly bad, but evidently hemp and possibly other materials can be used. Exactly what works under given conditions is not known to me. It may be another one of the 'masonic' secrets.
I HAVE tried it, as much as I have claimed to. I have used said plastic tubing with the actual Botryococcus braunii I described. Why hasn't my plan taken over the world? Well, I just did a pilot project on my back porch, because I live in the city. I am not a 'professional microbiologist', and there's no money to be made in supporting my research, so I haven't had anyone fund me to expand this beyond the pilot project stage. The amount of oil I extracted was fairly small, but I was using air as a carbon dioxide source, which is hardly 'concentrated', even in the city.
As far as the use of glass: I investigated this possibility. Glass is more expensive, heavier, fragile, and harder to get. I don't think of it as any more 'eco-friendly', because the production of glass still requires a lot of (heat) energy, most of which will come from petroleum. What, you say, there's no silicon shortage but there is of plastic...well, not really. Plastic does now come from petroleum, but the whole point of Botryococcus braunii is it creates hydrocarbons which are useful, and can potentially be reformed into plastics. Yes, we are still far away from doing this, but it does not negate the idea that it is possible, even likely, in the future.
If someone wants to fund a computer guy, with out 'credentials' in microbiology or organic chemistry, to turn my experiments into an actual, working plant to abate carbon emissions while creating a usable fuel, I'd be very happy. But it's not likely to happen, which is why I am very open about the idea - I am hoping that others can take it and do something with it. Yes, it would be nice if I made some money out of it, but I don't plan on doing so. I have various projects in computer networking and computer security which are more likely to make me money, and are within my area of expertise. These are what I am pinning my hopes on, to make a decent wage.
The problem is that these researchers all want to come up with some invention that they can patent and make a fortune. But the process is really to simple for such an approach. Gradual refinement is what is needed. Here's how to do it: Botryococcus braunii (Bb) is a microalgae which produces a gooey oil outside the cell, comprising up to 83% of its total weight. Because it is outside the cell, the organism does not have to be killed in order for the product to be extracted. This makes up for its growth rate being slower than that of other microalgae, something which is lost on some of these alt-fuel schemesters. The oil it produces can be directly refined into alkanes such as octane (gasoline) and various jet fuels.
Here's how to do it: take as rich of a carbon dioxide source as you can get (but at some point it can be too rich), such as a coal burning power plant, a brewery, or Chicago politician. Hook this up to a tubular photobioreactor of some significant length, so that process can be continuous. When the algal cells have reached some level of oil generation, strip the oil off with a solvent, preferably hexane. Use of the appropriate solvent will not kill the majority of the algae (sheep to be shorn). Cycle the naked algae back to the input of the carbon dioxide source.
A photobioreactor can be made on the cheap. Use tubular plastic sections of good transparency, such as the protectors made for long flourescent tubes, and hook them together with elbows of common plastic plumbing. Suspend these a few inches above a reflective surface. I think it may be possible to take surplus aluminum siding and polish the underside of it. I think you could even use wire coathangers as supports if you didn't have anything better.
The point is, that it's not important to be particularly efficient if you can do it on a large scale, cheaply. Over time, more productive strains of algae can be bred or engineered.
For more information, see the Botryococcus braunii entry on wikipedia.
This planet is too big, too close to its Sun, and orbiting too fast to be habitable in any way we are accustomed too. But this doesn't mean its discovery is not news: Astronomers are finding more evidence that planets are common. Progress is being made towards discovering planets more like our own than the gas giants which were first discovered.
What is needed is more telescopes of good sensitivity. Each main sequence star not wholly unlike our own needs to be carefully monitored over time, in order to detect planetary crossings, and then focus the best telescopes on the most promising stars.
In which sense do you mean 'MODERATION'? As in restraint, i.e. "Use moderation in all things, including moderation". Or, do you mean, the actions of the slashdot moderation system of article prioritization?
In either case, I disagree. Just because.
Neither does then Penguinista Republic, and the other nations of the far southern hemisphere. But talk is cheap and land is available so these countries let the Northerners make a lot of noise and build their huts because it's too much bother to throw snowballs at them. There are limits to the tolerance that the Southern Nations has shown, so don't press your luck. In fact, the amount of fish the North is taking from Southern waters is a bit high and needs to be reduced. But go ahead, build your telescope.
I wonder about the utility of this telescope. It is claimed that the images obtained will be 'almost as good as' those from Hubble. Perhaps during most of the year, but during Antarctic summer, the sun shines the whole day, so the telescope will be useless a great portion of the time. Or, maybe it's not simply an optical telescope? In either case, the cost of building and maintaining such an observatory are high. If it is to be manned, higher still. If it is build on the ice pack, it had better generate very little heat, or it will sink just like so many Antarctic bases.
How, I realize that it is difficult to get time on the really good telescopes around the world, and in space. So, perhaps this 'less than Hubble' is still practical. I just wish we had the money to build more space telescopes. particularly deep space ones, away from the solar wind.
If you spot reading slashdot, you might find the time and focus to finish your dissertation. Seriously, reading Slashdot too much serves to create an Attention Defecit Disorder. Now if....whoo what's that! I found another open wifi network!...now where was I? Yea...Slashdot is like a bazaar of ideas, but you just went out for milk and bread.
Yea I think that I need some calm spot too. It's too hectic in Boston.
This machine has too many 'improvements' for me to feel like it is an honest replica. Nonetheless, I like the idea. I might get one. I still have my Apple ][+, with the books, green composite monitor, cards including an Apple Cat 212 modem.
I also have some old, 1977 original apple program cassettes. It would be kind of cool to run those on a replica Apple.
Of all the apple books, my favorite was "Beneath Apple DOS", which was enough documentation for me to screw around with DOS 3.3 enough to do some wicked cool things, even crack copy protection.
I agree.. For many years I had a very fast web site because everything was done in text. Now there's some graphics, but it still loads pretty fast. The problem is, there's all these new inventions, loading content that is not static, but computed, from a wide number of sites, each with several DNS lookups (multiple dns lookups slow down site view immensely). Too many web designers are paid by the hour, and tell their clients that they need to look 'modern' with whatever gadgets and eye candy is out there. Macromedia Flash is the best example of this. Any web site which is primarily informational should be easy to view on a P2-500 with 128mb of ram and a 192k net connection, or less. It's time the Internet went on a diet.
You kids don't know what it was like, accessing the Internet, when it was called the Arpanet, at 300 baud with 48k of ram and no web. We had other ways of organizing data these days, and we liked it, because we looked like wizards to the rest of the muggles. Best of all, no ads!
It doesn't matter too much how efficient a power source is, as long as the fuel is plentiful. For instance, if you have a REAL LOT of petrochemicals it doesn't really matter how much you have to use to get to mars, etc. BUT more important is how DENSE the energy source is...i.e, how much more of the fuel does it take to move the fuel that is going to be used later on. This gets to be a BIG PROBLEM with chemical fuels, as even at their best they are not very DENSE. Of course, efficiency helps. But say, for a moment, that you have a nice large nuclear power plant on earth...you could probably use all that heat to either directly or indirectly (though electricity) create some high-density chemical fuels...but there's a limit to how much power a chemical fuel can provide. We need NUCLEAR FUEL, be it fission or fusion, or even better ANTIMATTER fuel. While some people claim that nuclear fuel is too dangerous to use on earth, I disagree. But I do think that antimatter is too dangerous to be used anywhere in the vicinity of important and/or massive objects (can't have the earth or space station pummeled by shrapnel in the case of an antimatter explosion, can we? And remember, there's no air friction to slow this shrapnel down). So, the best advice is to use fission, or hopefully fusion once technology gives up on the silly Tokamak idea, to leave earth's gravity well and move far enough out of the plane to be safe, and then use antimatter to the long haul. What, you say antimatter is too expensive? That's only because you've picked the wrong places to manufacture it. Production using solar power in CLOSE SOLAR ORBIT, in a thousand factories, should make antimatter cheap enough. You just have to go fetch it from close-solar orbits, which can be robotically done using the antimatter as fuel itself! The factories themselves can be replicaed using easily available materials from the moon or asteroids, and then replicated in close solar orbit using the vast energy resouces of the sun.
So to sum up, the problem isn't the amount of energy required, but the location of that energy. Move our energy conversion devices closer to the source, and we'll have plnety of consumable energy, even if it has to go through several intermediate storage mechanisms to become safe and easily accessible.
And yes, I've said this in other places, over time. I just hope that I get through to someone who is charged with long-term planning for space exploration.
This topic is important for me, as this planet isn't big enough for me and You.
So, how to deal with space junk of one type or another? The first problem is detection. The faster your trael, the more difficult it is to detect and react quickly enough. This limits us to less than half-light speed, because the best we can do is to use radio or light to broadcast and have time to reflect back to us (taking into account various doppler shifts), some processing time, and then enough time to perform a countermeasure. Due to the fact that our interstellar ship are most likely to be large (because they are packing a lot of fuel, plus the million tons or so of cargo and personnell needed to form a new colony), and that large objects are more likely to have been found in advance (if not by stationary telescopes in the Solar system, then by advance detection of the travelling ship), the small 'dust' is more likely to be a problem. The solution is to funnel these down the central, hollow core of our interstellar space-ship and to use them as reaction mass, i.e. we make them flow around us and then push on them...sorta like a boat? Do this by electromagnetic means (yeah you might think that only iron, nickel, and cobalt repond to magnetic fields - but the truth is that all matter does, but that those three aformentioned elements are most easily effected, which stuff like hydrogen and belly-button lint are less so.)
Anyhow I have started a blog on this type of stuff, of which I am dangerously educated (enough to be dangerous), http://realisticinterstellartravel.blogspot.com.
If my logic seems a little fuzzy it's because I am a little fuzzy, after six Sierra Nevada Pale Ales. If anyone wants to discuss this more, I suggest a drinking tour of Cambridge, from the Thirsty Ear, to the Queen's Head Pub: "In vino veritas" but I will substitute beer for wine, because I am a northern European.
Cadmium is one of the "toxic heavy metals" {insert music pun here} and because of this, no matter what amount is used and to any degree of value, it will be shot down by the enviro-namby-pambys who took lead outta my solder.
If you commute from NH, you get to pay the very high NH property taxes (because property taxes are the primary source of state revenue, as there is no income or sales tax), but if your employer is in mass, you get to pay the high Mass income tax. Wow! the joy of double taxation?
I was born in Boston of Boston heritage, but grew up in western Mass, only to move back to Boston as an adult. I have very mixed feelings about the city. It's not a place to pick a well-paying IT job...as long as you have a prestigious degree. The place has a surplus of Harvard/MIT/BU/etc. students and grads. Housing here is not cheap, but many of the buildings are strong and with character, so much unlike other tech hot-spots. There is public transit, and it does work, but is really only viable for night-time transit along the major subway/streetcar lines. The bus system SUCKS, but much of that has to do with the drivers here, who are so aggressive as to make road rage a serious problem.
The weather here is always pretty humid, so when it gets hot in the summer its nasty. In the winter, daytime temperature rises just enough above freezing to melt the snow a little bit, and then at night drop below freezing and you get ICE. Lots of it! I miss living outside the city where the snow comes just after thanksgiving and stays until just before Easter, and doesn't really get that freeze/thaw thing going on. We have beaches (fresh and salt water) you can actually swim and boat at (the water pollution has declined dramatically), and some of the ones further away from the city aren't too crowded.
Probably the more anger-provoking thing that happens to you here can be avoided by just avoiding the newspapers and having as little to do with government as possible. From the state capital down to the town halls, they're corrupt and see their jobs as saying "no" unless you give them a big, personal reason to say "yes". It's funny how used to encountering assholes in government offices I've become, that when I was in upstate NY I had some bureaucrats actually trying to help me rather than stymie me. It was refreshing.
As far as sports go, I HATE SPORTS..I hate Bosox fans the worst. When they 'reversed the curse', the street were raucus and that was something to see, but the townie contingent with their baseball caps just drive me away from places like Dedham.
Right about now is when you can expect the weather to start getting hot around here, and ugly. but it's been unseasonably Seattle-like for the past few days, and I have no complaints.
Oh, as far as the age of the city, by US standards it is very old. By European standards not so much. but the average age of architecture in the city and immediate suburbs is probably about 110, which puts in on par with a lot of European cities I've seen. The oldest building in the area was built in 1636 (actually oldest building in English America), and is pretty much the same now as when it was built. Buildings start to be considered historically 'old' if they were built before 1800. It's not that hard to buy a house built in 1780 or so in rural areas.
New England has some of the most beautiful countryside I have ever seen, and lots of woods and very climbable mountains. If you pick the right time to drive out of the city, you can be there in twenty minutes.
For the record, I will jump in glee when Ted Kennedy dies. Which undoubtably, is the only way he'll ever leave office.