This is an age-old question. Engineers always seem to be hard-pressed to explain what they are doing all day long.
This can lead to problems when the people asking the question are non-technical AND have the power to defund projects or departments they don't understand.
Take my neighbor. He retired. He has a very small social security, some stock that has declined sharply, and a sizeable savings account that produces currently almost no interest.
How exactly could that person spend his money on "durable and valuable goods"? What kind of goods, and how will he still be able to pay the bills?
The elderly would be the first victims of such a stupid policy, just like inflation victimized them in the 70s.
Who says individuals don't get charged? That's the whole point of negative-interest rate policies. Bank accounts above a certain amount are already charged negative interest in Switzerland, for example.
As for Japan, there is currently a quiet run on banks due to negative interest. Japanese people hoard cash and buy safes.
Of course it will backfire. People will have to save more fore retirement since they cannot count on positive interest to produce gains. Hence consumption and growth will decrease further.
That's why these bozos want to ban most cash. They don't want you to withdraw your cash when the negative interest policy hits.
I agree, Unicomp keyboards are hard to beat thanks to their buckling spring switches. And the price is awesome: $80 or so for a keyboard that feels *solid*. Compare to at least $120 for most Cherry-based keyboards.
I use mine in a software development office (cubicles) and I don't have complains. To the contrary, other developers and sysadmins have bought their own Unicomp after typing a few test lines.
Too bad the poster posted as AC, this is a very thoughtful post.
Having a gun inside a thin-walled spacecraft filled with oxygen sounds crazy,
Having a spacecraft filled with pure oxygen sounds and is crazy. The Apollo 1 fire (1967) showed just how crazy it is. Which is why they don't do it anymore. Neither ISS nor the Russian capsules have a pure oxygen atmosphere. In fact, the ISS atmosphere is ground-level pressure with 20% oxygen. Only the EVA suits have a low-pressure, high-oxygen breathable mix.
I "escorted" a precious cargo on a flight once. It was in a padded plastic case looking a lot like this one. We simply bought a seat for the case! It was not an antique, it was a motherboard tester prototype. We simply couldn't risk getting one of these protos damaged or lost.
From the paternalist, condescending article:
Beyond firearms, of course, TSA officers encounter an extremely wide variety of other prohibited items at airport checkpoints, including... an unloaded cannon.
Because archeologist or collectors should absolutely check in priceless historical artifacts! It's not like baggage handler would steal anything, or the airlines would lose luggage, ho ho, how silly.
Hey, this thing was a firearm once, right? So it's totally justified, innit? Even though the picture even shows that the thing is rusty, unable to fire, and very old.
Do you know how funny it is in Dilbert cartoon when the PHB adopts a tone of condescending smugness to assert misinformed, ill-reasoned opinions? Well, somehow, these bureaucrats don't manage to make it funny.
Your work on a certain luxury liner is very well documented. However, it's harder to find details about your work to locate and study the wrecks of U.S.S. Thresher and U.S.S. Scorpion.
How much of this is still classified? What good publicly available source(s) would you recommend to learn more about these missions?
The article barks at the wrong tree. The cryosphere page at University of Illinois-Champagne shows that we are currently seeing 1.3 million sq. kmmore sea ice than the average, and the levels have been sharply rising the last few years.
There is a fine balance between trying to increase awareness and being a downright propagandist. Unfortunately, this article doesn't help the cause. This is exactly the kind of thing that make people believe environmentalists are exaggerating and grasping at straws.
IBM Rational has a product called CLM, an expensive software lifecycle management system, for which the bug and backlog lists are public. So your marketing might want to consider this.
Then again, CLM is targetting developers, a crowd that is used to the notion that software has bugs. If you are selling your product to marketing, sales and other professional liars, you might want to hide the bugs. Reality frightens these guys.
I remember reading similar research in the 1980s. Biologist Remy Chauvin was observing rejuvenating effects of transfusions in animals and trying to generate interest for seriously studying and understanding the phenomenon. The ossified "scientific community" laughed him out of the room. He was very bitter about it because he knew he was up to something.
Even if this doesn't translate into a fountain of youth, this is still a major scientific breakthrough.
The Chinese government had grabbed the rare earth market by cutting down prices (yes, labor camps and lax pollution rules help). Then they restricted supply, attempting to force Western manufacturers to bring to China all productions of materials using rare earths. Within months, out-of-China RE production that was shut down because of cost resumed, and prices actually went down. It's all in this amusing article written by a guy who used to trade this stuff.
This is one of many papers showing that 1. The Mayan empire was subject to a series of droughts that finally offed them, and 2. That variations of solar activities caused these droughts.
It doesn't "suggest" anything, it forcibly affirms it with tons of data to accompany it.
Yup, the machine fell on its side. It wasn't ruined, just damaged. Fixing it wouldn't have been a huge project. That's what makes it unforgivable. Twenty years wasted.
The Delta Clipper (DC/X) performed the very same stunt back in the 90s: Take off and land on its rocket. That was 20 years ago.
The DC/X was a demonstrator of a single-stage-to-orbit project. It promised to bring down the cost of space flight by an order of magnitude and make the Space Shuttle obsolete.
It flew several times, achieving perfect flights, then was given to NASA. They "acccidentally" forgot to connect the hydraulic line that deployed on of the landing struts and the DC/X crashed at its first NASA landing. And oh darn, they couldn't find the couple of millions needed to fix it.
This dangerous competitor to the shuttle was thus killed. The Shuttle program was safe. Whew.
Now that the Shuttle is no more, revolutionary concepts such as DC/X or its Xombie imitation might safely crawl out of the hole in which NASA had thrown them. Maybe.
The first rule of a bureaucracy is self-perpetuation. The fact that a bureaucracy is building space shuttles doesn't change its bureaucratic nature.
You get your law school buddies on the phone. One of them knows alumni who are lobbying in DC. You get them to write a law making it illegal to dispense robot-assisted legal services. To, ya know, protect the public. Then you slip the law as an amendment into the Turnip Calibration and Uniformization Act of 2012, and important 450-page text regulating the color, texture, size and water content of turnip for sale in the US that will be passed at 3 AM during the electoral campaign, and that nobody will bother to touch, much less read.
The exact same thing happened when will-writing software started to appear. The call to ban was not very effective -- only family law practitioners were threatened, after all. But if you threaten the very income of trial lawyers, they'll be surprisingly effective at quashing the threat.
There are now almost 3,000 megawatts of solar electric energy installed in the U.S., enough to power 600,000 homes.
This would mean that each home consumes 5 kW. That's really low. Most small houses have a 100 A panel if their stove is electric. 200 A panels are pretty common. The reality is closer to 10 kW.
For comparison, 3 GW is either three large gas or coal thermal plants, or 1.5 nuclear reactors.
Remember, on top of that, that you cannot store electricity unless your production is near a hydro dam -- you can then pump up water back into the dam as storage, at a 30 to 50% efficiency loss. So your 3GW solar plant need a load-following thermal or nuclear plant to absorb the loss when the sun hides or at night. You have to factor that in the cost. That adds $5 to $10 per watt.
Apologies for not replying sooner. Costs can be pretty opaque when the State is in charge of selling something. In the present case, however, acquisition of the fuel and disposal of the waste have been factored in. A provision is also made to dismantle each plant by paying into an escrow.
Wind is interesting but has the major problem of being rapidly variable. Moreover, Germany and Spain, which are big on wind, went through several episodes of zero wind during days of high power consumption (Germany in particular had a stationary anticyclone sitting on the country, resulting in no wind and freezing cold, which brought down the grid thanks to electric heating).
The only way to make wind viable is to associate it with generators powered by natural gas turbines, which are able to increase their production from 0 to 100% within seconds. This can be viable only in countries with large gas resources. Interestingly, large natural gas companies are investing in wind energy -- see T. Boone Pickens in the US. Otherwise, since wind turbines can't follow the load, they would wreck havoc on the grid. In general, energy sources that can't follow the load (that is, adjust their output to regional consumption) are doomed to being accessories at best, and must be supplemented by highly variable generators (read: gas). Wind falls into that category. I wish it was otherwise, but physics is a harsh mistress.
I disagree about your assessment of nuclear energy. Until fusion comes along, this technology is the only practical way we can wean the world from burning fossil fuels.
Wrong, they pay heavily all the way. Nuclear fuel, reprocessing, building the plant, operating it, and dismantling it are all separate accounts, and it's handled by scores of private contractors. All of that is paid for by the electricity bills. That's still cheaper than other forms of electric power.
I agree. I question the mode of cost calculation in the article.
Here is a reference point. 82% of France's electricity comes from nuclear power plants. The price of power for industrial customers is about 0.06 USD/kWh. This includes huge personnel and pension costs (powerful unions) and sloppy financial management (politically appointed execs). So it means that actual production and delivery costs are below this price point. Since EDF, the French electricity semi-public firm, is a monopoly, there is little incentive to be more cost-effective. And yet, even so, they achieve a cost of 6 cents per kWh.
I am therefore not impressed with the 0.16,USD/kWh quoted. It' s almost 3 times more expensive than what the French can get, without even trying to be cost-effective.
I will not shop at CompUSA unless it's the only place I can get a part needed to get a system up and running.
Wow, considering some of the BB tales here, that's a pretty strong statement. Can you please tell us why you feel so strongly against CompUSA? If you have horror stories, please share them: you might save other/.ers a painful experience.
This type of laser has been successfully used to shoot incoming missiles and mortar rounds. The first application will be battlefield defense against projectile and missiles. See this for example this article.
And no, you cannot coat a warhead with a mirror surface.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an age-old question. Engineers always seem to be hard-pressed to explain what they are doing all day long.
This can lead to problems when the people asking the question are non-technical AND have the power to defund projects or departments they don't understand.
My favorite comic strip on the topic (oldie but goldie): http://revoltingregulations.bl...
Take my neighbor. He retired. He has a very small social security, some stock that has declined sharply, and a sizeable savings account that produces currently almost no interest.
How exactly could that person spend his money on "durable and valuable goods"? What kind of goods, and how will he still be able to pay the bills?
The elderly would be the first victims of such a stupid policy, just like inflation victimized them in the 70s.
Who says individuals don't get charged? That's the whole point of negative-interest rate policies. Bank accounts above a certain amount are already charged negative interest in Switzerland, for example.
As for Japan, there is currently a quiet run on banks due to negative interest. Japanese people hoard cash and buy safes.
Of course it will backfire. People will have to save more fore retirement since they cannot count on positive interest to produce gains. Hence consumption and growth will decrease further.
That's why these bozos want to ban most cash. They don't want you to withdraw your cash when the negative interest policy hits.
Hooray for transcripts! Thanks for providing this one.
I agree, Unicomp keyboards are hard to beat thanks to their buckling spring switches. And the price is awesome: $80 or so for a keyboard that feels *solid*. Compare to at least $120 for most Cherry-based keyboards. I use mine in a software development office (cubicles) and I don't have complains. To the contrary, other developers and sysadmins have bought their own Unicomp after typing a few test lines. Too bad the poster posted as AC, this is a very thoughtful post.
Having a gun inside a thin-walled spacecraft filled with oxygen sounds crazy,
Having a spacecraft filled with pure oxygen sounds and is crazy. The Apollo 1 fire (1967) showed just how crazy it is. Which is why they don't do it anymore. Neither ISS nor the Russian capsules have a pure oxygen atmosphere. In fact, the ISS atmosphere is ground-level pressure with 20% oxygen. Only the EVA suits have a low-pressure, high-oxygen breathable mix.
I "escorted" a precious cargo on a flight once. It was in a padded plastic case looking a lot like this one. We simply bought a seat for the case! It was not an antique, it was a motherboard tester prototype. We simply couldn't risk getting one of these protos damaged or lost.
From the paternalist, condescending article: Beyond firearms, of course, TSA officers encounter an extremely wide variety of other prohibited items at airport checkpoints, including ... an unloaded cannon.
Because archeologist or collectors should absolutely check in priceless historical artifacts! It's not like baggage handler would steal anything, or the airlines would lose luggage, ho ho, how silly.
Hey, this thing was a firearm once, right? So it's totally justified, innit? Even though the picture even shows that the thing is rusty, unable to fire, and very old.
Do you know how funny it is in Dilbert cartoon when the PHB adopts a tone of condescending smugness to assert misinformed, ill-reasoned opinions? Well, somehow, these bureaucrats don't manage to make it funny.
Your work on a certain luxury liner is very well documented. However, it's harder to find details about your work to locate and study the wrecks of U.S.S. Thresher and U.S.S. Scorpion.
How much of this is still classified? What good publicly available source(s) would you recommend to learn more about these missions?
The article barks at the wrong tree. The cryosphere page at University of Illinois-Champagne shows that we are currently seeing 1.3 million sq. km more sea ice than the average, and the levels have been sharply rising the last few years.
There is a fine balance between trying to increase awareness and being a downright propagandist. Unfortunately, this article doesn't help the cause. This is exactly the kind of thing that make people believe environmentalists are exaggerating and grasping at straws.
Wired: Stop. You are not helping.
IBM Rational has a product called CLM, an expensive software lifecycle management system, for which the bug and backlog lists are public. So your marketing might want to consider this. Then again, CLM is targetting developers, a crowd that is used to the notion that software has bugs. If you are selling your product to marketing, sales and other professional liars, you might want to hide the bugs. Reality frightens these guys.
Yeah, as the OP said, there is a lot of concern about Putin's crackdown on human rights. Why, the rumor is that he is using the tax administration to harass opponents and that his chief Justice has grabbed phone records from news agencies that don't tow the line.
Fortunately, such things would never happen in the US.
I remember reading similar research in the 1980s. Biologist Remy Chauvin was observing rejuvenating effects of transfusions in animals and trying to generate interest for seriously studying and understanding the phenomenon. The ossified "scientific community" laughed him out of the room. He was very bitter about it because he knew he was up to something.
Even if this doesn't translate into a fountain of youth, this is still a major scientific breakthrough.
The Chinese government had grabbed the rare earth market by cutting down prices (yes, labor camps and lax pollution rules help). Then they restricted supply, attempting to force Western manufacturers to bring to China all productions of materials using rare earths. Within months, out-of-China RE production that was shut down because of cost resumed, and prices actually went down. It's all in this amusing article written by a guy who used to trade this stuff.
Some new study. It was "new" when it was first published in Science in 2001? http://www.sciencemag.org/content/292/5520/1367.short
This is one of many papers showing that 1. The Mayan empire was subject to a series of droughts that finally offed them, and 2. That variations of solar activities caused these droughts.
It doesn't "suggest" anything, it forcibly affirms it with tons of data to accompany it.
Yup, the machine fell on its side. It wasn't ruined, just damaged. Fixing it wouldn't have been a huge project. That's what makes it unforgivable. Twenty years wasted.
The Delta Clipper (DC/X) performed the very same stunt back in the 90s: Take off and land on its rocket. That was 20 years ago.
The DC/X was a demonstrator of a single-stage-to-orbit project. It promised to bring down the cost of space flight by an order of magnitude and make the Space Shuttle obsolete.
It flew several times, achieving perfect flights, then was given to NASA. They "acccidentally" forgot to connect the hydraulic line that deployed on of the landing struts and the DC/X crashed at its first NASA landing. And oh darn, they couldn't find the couple of millions needed to fix it.
This dangerous competitor to the shuttle was thus killed. The Shuttle program was safe. Whew.
Now that the Shuttle is no more, revolutionary concepts such as DC/X or its Xombie imitation might safely crawl out of the hole in which NASA had thrown them. Maybe.
The first rule of a bureaucracy is self-perpetuation. The fact that a bureaucracy is building space shuttles doesn't change its bureaucratic nature.
What do you do now?
You get your law school buddies on the phone. One of them knows alumni who are lobbying in DC. You get them to write a law making it illegal to dispense robot-assisted legal services. To, ya know, protect the public. Then you slip the law as an amendment into the Turnip Calibration and Uniformization Act of 2012, and important 450-page text regulating the color, texture, size and water content of turnip for sale in the US that will be passed at 3 AM during the electoral campaign, and that nobody will bother to touch, much less read.
If you think I am joking, look at the way the MAFIAA got artists to work for free: they slipped an amendment in the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act of 1999 that turns most new recordings into work-for-hire jobs where the studio owns the copyright.
The exact same thing happened when will-writing software started to appear. The call to ban was not very effective -- only family law practitioners were threatened, after all. But if you threaten the very income of trial lawyers, they'll be surprisingly effective at quashing the threat.
There are now almost 3,000 megawatts of solar electric energy installed in the U.S., enough to power 600,000 homes.
This would mean that each home consumes 5 kW. That's really low. Most small houses have a 100 A panel if their stove is electric. 200 A panels are pretty common. The reality is closer to 10 kW.
For comparison, 3 GW is either three large gas or coal thermal plants, or 1.5 nuclear reactors.
Remember, on top of that, that you cannot store electricity unless your production is near a hydro dam -- you can then pump up water back into the dam as storage, at a 30 to 50% efficiency loss. So your 3GW solar plant need a load-following thermal or nuclear plant to absorb the loss when the sun hides or at night. You have to factor that in the cost. That adds $5 to $10 per watt.
Apologies for not replying sooner. Costs can be pretty opaque when the State is in charge of selling something. In the present case, however, acquisition of the fuel and disposal of the waste have been factored in. A provision is also made to dismantle each plant by paying into an escrow.
Wind is interesting but has the major problem of being rapidly variable. Moreover, Germany and Spain, which are big on wind, went through several episodes of zero wind during days of high power consumption (Germany in particular had a stationary anticyclone sitting on the country, resulting in no wind and freezing cold, which brought down the grid thanks to electric heating).
The only way to make wind viable is to associate it with generators powered by natural gas turbines, which are able to increase their production from 0 to 100% within seconds. This can be viable only in countries with large gas resources. Interestingly, large natural gas companies are investing in wind energy -- see T. Boone Pickens in the US. Otherwise, since wind turbines can't follow the load, they would wreck havoc on the grid. In general, energy sources that can't follow the load (that is, adjust their output to regional consumption) are doomed to being accessories at best, and must be supplemented by highly variable generators (read: gas). Wind falls into that category. I wish it was otherwise, but physics is a harsh mistress.
I disagree about your assessment of nuclear energy. Until fusion comes along, this technology is the only practical way we can wean the world from burning fossil fuels.
Wrong, they pay heavily all the way. Nuclear fuel, reprocessing, building the plant, operating it, and dismantling it are all separate accounts, and it's handled by scores of private contractors. All of that is paid for by the electricity bills. That's still cheaper than other forms of electric power.
I agree. I question the mode of cost calculation in the article.
Here is a reference point. 82% of France's electricity comes from nuclear power plants. The price of power for industrial customers is about 0.06 USD/kWh. This includes huge personnel and pension costs (powerful unions) and sloppy financial management (politically appointed execs). So it means that actual production and delivery costs are below this price point. Since EDF, the French electricity semi-public firm, is a monopoly, there is little incentive to be more cost-effective. And yet, even so, they achieve a cost of 6 cents per kWh.
I am therefore not impressed with the 0.16,USD/kWh quoted. It' s almost 3 times more expensive than what the French can get, without even trying to be cost-effective.
I will not shop at CompUSA unless it's the only place I can get a part needed to get a system up and running.
Wow, considering some of the BB tales here, that's a pretty strong statement. Can you please tell us why you feel so strongly against CompUSA? If you have horror stories, please share them: you might save other /.ers a painful experience.
Agreed. That's the best way to distribute software in a distro-agnostic way.
And yes, the Dell D610 works fine with Linux (Ubuntu here), even the suspend, the wifi and the 3D graphics.
This type of laser has been successfully used to shoot incoming missiles and mortar rounds. The first application will be battlefield defense against projectile and missiles. See this for example this article.
And no, you cannot coat a warhead with a mirror surface.