I thought that the Boeing plane should have won the competition, mostly because it fulfilled the specification better; while being smaller, lighter, and immeasurably simpler.
Yes, but politics were involved. Someone in the Pentagon has shot down proposals from McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing) for the last 20 years, even when they were superior to the competition. While Boeing now owns the company, apparently that bias is still alive and well in Washington.
And considering Boeing still wants to get subcontracting work from Lockheed for the JSF, they are certainly going to be diplomatic....
Sure, they're using politicians and lobbyists to try to force the Pentagon to distribute the work, but they're still not going to speak ill of Lockheed.
It is much more stable and feasible than Boeing's version. In fact the fact that Boeing built it off the Harrier should be a dead give away that there had to be a better way.
A few test planes prove that it's more stable and feasible? The fact that Boeing based it off the Harrier system showed that it was a proven system that people were already familiar with. A big benefit when you need something to work under combat conditions....only time will tell if Lockheed's system is really worth anything...
Yep. In fact, the St. Louis Post Dispatch even ran this article on the op-ed page a couple of weeks ago with the illustration. So the freelance writer for the Beijing paper could have actually stumbled across it in the Post. Now, the Post fully credited The Onion for it, but it's possible that if this guy did see it in the Post, he may not have caught that.
What makes it all funnier than shit is that the Post has been strongly backing public financing of the ballpark, and they claim it has nothing to do with their parent company having an ownership stake in the team.....so for them to actually print this parody was suprising.
The machines are very fun to watch...ok, maybe not for non-geeks. But when I worked at a company that did electronics manufacturing, it always liked watching the surface-mount machines stick the components on. Oh, and the wave solder machines are really fun. Watching a wave of molten solder welling up is something to behold...
I suspect when they say "tested" in the article, they mean those are subject to long term testing. Usually every device that comes off the line in a place like this is popped on a testing jig to be sure everything works, but only a small sample is hooked up in a lab for extensive tests.
The quick test tells you if the board stuffing is working correctly (and you want to know this quickly to prevent further waste), and the longer test looks for hidden defects in a statistical sample.
True, it is a total waste of resources to the rest of us, but MS has what, $30 billion in cash on had? What many minutes worth of interest on this did the study cost them?
Well, there's your problem... Look at the rest of what chrisd put in the article: references to the same people supporting a missle defense system and the V-22 Osprey, which he refers to as "unworkable" and a "deathplane" respectively.
Depleted is an ugly word. A large oil company has a tremendous amount of overhead costs, and they need to focus their spending on investments which will provide a return. So they can keep paying the costs to operate a marginal well, or they can plow that money into new wells elsewhere which will provide them a better ROI.
The rights to that well are then sold to smaller operators, sometimes to the point where the land owner ends up with all mineral rights and operates the well himself. Each entity down this chain has lower and lower fixed costs, and can economically produce oil from what becomes termed a 'stripper well'. Production from each stripper well is very low, but together they make up a tremedous amount of oil production.
When the price of oil dips too much for too long, it costs the operator more to run the pumps than what he can sell the oil for. Then the operator might shut the pump off. The only problem is that the well might then be lost, because if you stop running, the well can skin over such that you can't get oil out again. The fact that these stripper wells produce those small quantities of oil for a very long time makes them important though, and oil states like Texas and Oklahoma work hard during low price periods to make sure the small operators can keep their pumps running.
Anyway I got a bit off track there, but it's to demonstrate the just because "the oil companies" are pulling out doesn't mean the oil is gone. They're working in East Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, where there's huge upside potential in drilling for natural gas.
I think you're confusing the Middle East with Africa. In the Middle East, the governments get most of the money. In Africa, the outside oil companies have come in and are indeed keeping most of the profit, only giving a little to the state.
Are those countries being cheated? Maybe. But they're getting some money from their resources. They weren't getting any having it sit there in the ground.
And BTW, lets refrain from the U.S. bashing on this one, since most of the oil companies working in places like Africa are European (i.e. Royal Dutch Shell, BP, etc.)
Uh, Iceland is a freakin' volcano. Abundant geothermal energy is available very near the surface.
Yes, large scale geothermal usage elsewhere in the world would require very deep drilling. But you can set up small scale geothermal systems in your backyard to provide a small amount of heat during the winter.
Yep. Borland^H^H^H^H^H^H^HInprise^H^H^H^H^H^H^HBorland has gotten greedy. We used to use Visibroker in our products, and so had to pay them royalties. When it came time for renewal, they decided they'd severly jack up the royalty cost, I suppose presuming that since we'd built our product around Visibroker, that it would be prohibitive for us to change.
Their mistake. They wouldn't budge on the new royalties, so we changed to an Open Source ORB. So they could have continued with revenue from us, with maybe even a small increase being OK, but they got greedy and lost it all.
Hell, I wouldn't mind if they sold the half-empty ones as replacements. At home we need color once in a while, and there's nothing worse than having shelled out money for a cartridge and the ink drying out, or getting to nasty to print cleanly.
I'd much rather save a few bucks on the cartridge and have it run dry sooner.
Yeah...I had some company want to send me some of their anti-static wipes for cleaning monitors and such. They wanted to send me some samples they said, to which I said "sure..we can try them out".
They then went on to say that they'd be sending x many, at a cost of y. Whoa! They really snuck in the fact at the end that the 'samples' were several hundred dollars worth of product. At that point I told them "no, do not send me any. bye!"
So of COURSE they want you to check your credit report. Just make sure to get it mailed to a PO box.
Oh geez....if you have any account that reports to a credit bureau, they have your current address. Let's see, do you rent an apartment or have a mortgage? Most apartment management companies report to credit bureaus, and of course mortgage co.s do.
Credit card?
Loan? Be it student, car, or whatever, the holder reports.
Cell phone?
Utilities?
There are all kinds of companies you deal with every day, who already have your correct address and give it to the credit bureaus.
You might also have a condition call psoriasis. The elbows are a favorite place for it. Talk to a dermatologist. It can't be cured, but there are treatments that can help a great deal.
More importantly, most bathrooms get cleaned on a regular basis with strong disinfectants, so any bacterial/viral populations are always being wiped out.
While he did do a good job, all I can think about is the liability he opened himself up to, and probably CalTrans as well. One person carrying a metal sign above traffic, and affixing it. The opportunity for this sign to be dropped onto traffic was there. Lucky for him it didn't happen. Hell, even dropping a bolt or something would be enough to break a windshield...
In most places, signage work like this would be done with a lane closure under the spot where the work was being done, so his being up there without the lane closed would be suspicious anyway. But perhaps with the volume of traffic in California, they don't do this...
Re:Official Signs that you'd think would be jokes.
on
Hacking the Highways
·
· Score: 1
Missouri has a small town called "Knob Lick". Their signs go missing quite a bit....
Re:Official Signs that you'd think would be jokes.
on
Hacking the Highways
·
· Score: 1
That's OK...we've got a local steel company called "Big Boy's Steel Erection". Given the fact that it's ironworkers, I'm sure the name was chosen for the other possible meanings...
Slashdot Mirror
they were Elephant brand
Ah yes..."Elephant Never Forgets"
I thought that the Boeing plane should have won the competition, mostly because it fulfilled the specification better; while being smaller, lighter, and immeasurably simpler.
Yes, but politics were involved. Someone in the Pentagon has shot down proposals from McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing) for the last 20 years, even when they were superior to the competition. While Boeing now owns the company, apparently that bias is still alive and well in Washington.
And considering Boeing still wants to get subcontracting work from Lockheed for the JSF, they are certainly going to be diplomatic....
Sure, they're using politicians and lobbyists to try to force the Pentagon to distribute the work, but they're still not going to speak ill of Lockheed.
It is much more stable and feasible than Boeing's version. In fact the fact that Boeing built it off the Harrier should be a dead give away that there had to be a better way.
A few test planes prove that it's more stable and feasible? The fact that Boeing based it off the Harrier system showed that it was a proven system that people were already familiar with. A big benefit when you need something to work under combat conditions....only time will tell if Lockheed's system is really worth anything...
Yep. In fact, the St. Louis Post Dispatch even ran this article on the op-ed page a couple of weeks ago with the illustration. So the freelance writer for the Beijing paper could have actually stumbled across it in the Post. Now, the Post fully credited The Onion for it, but it's possible that if this guy did see it in the Post, he may not have caught that.
What makes it all funnier than shit is that the Post has been strongly backing public financing of the ballpark, and they claim it has nothing to do with their parent company having an ownership stake in the team.....so for them to actually print this parody was suprising.
The author of the article about the U.S. being rich, David Brooks, was on the Marketplace radio program last week introducing the article.
The page for the show is here, and has a link to the Real Audio archive of it.
It's followed by an interesting story on the horrendous interest rates charged by banks in Brazil.
The machines are very fun to watch...ok, maybe not for non-geeks. But when I worked at a company that did electronics manufacturing, it always liked watching the surface-mount machines stick the components on. Oh, and the wave solder machines are really fun. Watching a wave of molten solder welling up is something to behold...
I suspect when they say "tested" in the article, they mean those are subject to long term testing. Usually every device that comes off the line in a place like this is popped on a testing jig to be sure everything works, but only a small sample is hooked up in a lab for extensive tests.
The quick test tells you if the board stuffing is working correctly (and you want to know this quickly to prevent further waste), and the longer test looks for hidden defects in a statistical sample.
True, it is a total waste of resources to the rest of us, but MS has what, $30 billion in cash on had? What many minutes worth of interest on this did the study cost them?
Top notch editors...
Well, there's your problem...
Look at the rest of what chrisd put in the article: references to the same people supporting a missle defense system and the V-22 Osprey, which he refers to as "unworkable" and a "deathplane" respectively.
Depleted is an ugly word. A large oil company has a tremendous amount of overhead costs, and they need to focus their spending on investments which will provide a return. So they can keep paying the costs to operate a marginal well, or they can plow that money into new wells elsewhere which will provide them a better ROI.
The rights to that well are then sold to smaller operators, sometimes to the point where the land owner ends up with all mineral rights and operates the well himself. Each entity down this chain has lower and lower fixed costs, and can economically produce oil from what becomes termed a 'stripper well'. Production from each stripper well is very low, but together they make up a tremedous amount of oil production.
When the price of oil dips too much for too long, it costs the operator more to run the pumps than what he can sell the oil for. Then the operator might shut the pump off. The only problem is that the well might then be lost, because if you stop running, the well can skin over such that you can't get oil out again. The fact that these stripper wells produce those small quantities of oil for a very long time makes them important though, and oil states like Texas and Oklahoma work hard during low price periods to make sure the small operators can keep their pumps running.
Anyway I got a bit off track there, but it's to demonstrate the just because "the oil companies" are pulling out doesn't mean the oil is gone. They're working in East Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, where there's huge upside potential in drilling for natural gas.
I think you're confusing the Middle East with Africa. In the Middle East, the governments get most of the money. In Africa, the outside oil companies have come in and are indeed keeping most of the profit, only giving a little to the state.
Are those countries being cheated? Maybe. But they're getting some money from their resources. They weren't getting any having it sit there in the ground.
And BTW, lets refrain from the U.S. bashing on this one, since most of the oil companies working in places like Africa are European (i.e. Royal Dutch Shell, BP, etc.)
Uh, Iceland is a freakin' volcano. Abundant geothermal energy is available very near the surface.
Yes, large scale geothermal usage elsewhere in the world would require very deep drilling. But you can set up small scale geothermal systems in your backyard to provide a small amount of heat during the winter.
Yep. Borland^H^H^H^H^H^H^HInprise^H^H^H^H^H^H^HBorland has gotten greedy. We used to use Visibroker in our products, and so had to pay them royalties. When it came time for renewal, they decided they'd severly jack up the royalty cost, I suppose presuming that since we'd built our product around Visibroker, that it would be prohibitive for us to change.
Their mistake. They wouldn't budge on the new royalties, so we changed to an Open Source ORB. So they could have continued with revenue from us, with maybe even a small increase being OK, but they got greedy and lost it all.
Hell, I wouldn't mind if they sold the half-empty ones as replacements. At home we need color once in a while, and there's nothing worse than having shelled out money for a cartridge and the ink drying out, or getting to nasty to print cleanly.
I'd much rather save a few bucks on the cartridge and have it run dry sooner.
Yeah...I had some company want to send me some of their anti-static wipes for cleaning monitors and such. They wanted to send me some samples they said, to which I said "sure..we can try them out".
They then went on to say that they'd be sending x many, at a cost of y. Whoa! They really snuck in the fact at the end that the 'samples' were several hundred dollars worth of product. At that point I told them "no, do not send me any. bye!"
However, they weren't offering any free gifts...
yeah, but it takes so long to do a search and see if pretty much the same story was posted a few days ago...
Or maybe the fall season has ended at Slashdot and we're into reruns....
So of COURSE they want you to check your credit report. Just make sure to get it mailed to a PO box.
Oh geez....if you have any account that reports to a credit bureau, they have your current address.
Let's see, do you rent an apartment or have a mortgage? Most apartment management companies report to credit bureaus, and of course mortgage co.s do.
Credit card?
Loan? Be it student, car, or whatever, the holder reports.
Cell phone?
Utilities?
There are all kinds of companies you deal with every day, who already have your correct address and give it to the credit bureaus.
You might also have a condition call psoriasis. The elbows are a favorite place for it. Talk to a dermatologist. It can't be cured, but there are treatments that can help a great deal.
More importantly, most bathrooms get cleaned on a regular basis with strong disinfectants, so any bacterial/viral populations are always being wiped out.
We'll be sure to take you to dinner at the restaurant that only employees non-hand washing hepatitis carriers....
Well, this page doesn't have theirs, but does have some good alternatives:
E C: www.mochamber.org/board.htm
http://www.thecommonspace.org/2001/10/eye.php
Another page mentions that they were doing construction work across the street from a gay bar...
And their office is on "Missouri Bottom Rd"
And if you're not convinced that the company exists, look at this Google cache of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce page:
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:ewOrB9JxoD
While he did do a good job, all I can think about is the liability he opened himself up to, and probably CalTrans as well. One person carrying a metal sign above traffic, and affixing it. The opportunity for this sign to be dropped onto traffic was there. Lucky for him it didn't happen. Hell, even dropping a bolt or something would be enough to break a windshield...
In most places, signage work like this would be done with a lane closure under the spot where the work was being done, so his being up there without the lane closed would be suspicious anyway. But perhaps with the volume of traffic in California, they don't do this...
Missouri has a small town called "Knob Lick". Their signs go missing quite a bit....
That's OK...we've got a local steel company called "Big Boy's Steel Erection". Given the fact that it's ironworkers, I'm sure the name was chosen for the other possible meanings...