Can't find any other way to contact you online...I started a journal entry to continue this discussion...I'm sending invitations to some of the participants, and asking one of them to tone down the personal nature of his comments.
When it comes to politics, nobody's stupid. Especially in cases where they think something is black/white.
Rather, they simply haven't had enough experience to show them otherwise. That's not immaturity, that's life. I was raised in an extremely conservative family, and it was a long time before I became as liberal as I tend to be now. ("Independant" label be damned, I'm liberal on some topics and conservative on others, just like everyone else. Unless a person never has to say "Well, that's different" to any scenario he's charged with, he's independant.)
ratamacue's views are just as valid as yours or mine, they're just brought on by different amounts and types of experience.
I disagree completely. The presence of people would make missions much more likely to succeed in a variable environment. There's nothing like a good engineer's ingenuity, a screwdriver and a soldering iron to get out of a tight spot.
Marswalks ought to be much simpler and easier than spacewalks, so repairs should go a lot faster.
Point taken on the oil-cracker. I'm no expert. However, I didn't say that carbon couldn't be burned, I said that it was already involved in existing chemical bonds.
I like your analysis...I'll pass on misis.org for now.
I suppose I meant, if the current government, law structure and legal precedents were landed on, say, a Libertarian President, how would things improve?
What I didn't get is, if Arthur was supposed to have been descended from the aliens that landed on the planet, why did Zaphod believe he knew The Question that follows from 42?
If you're lucky, you can use chemical catalysts to perform chemical changes on a substance while expending virtually no energy. That's what a catalytic converter does in a normal unleaded-fuel automobile.
You can't just add a gas truck to a convoy and say, "Oh yeah, and you guys have to protect him (jearking a thumb)"... The entire process and strategy, defense plan and whatnot have to be written to include the truck.
I would assume they'd send a bit of fuel with every vehicle, so that tactical costs were reduced, and so that losses in case of an attack were reduced. (How many video games have "destroy the (rich target)" as a mission objective?)
However, I do take your point about it being possible to tack on costs. I just don't think it applies as much in this scenario.
If you drive a tanker, it's going to have about a foot of armor around it. My guess it that they transport it in much smaller chunks. For one, that increases tactical capabilities. For two, it minimizes your losses if part of a convoy gets taken out.
Not quite correct...The instability of a substance represents how readily it will convert to another substance. The fact that you can burn oil at all shows that it only requires heat and oxygen to break it down. And that means you provide a little energy to get much more out.
Water doesn't burn at all in oxygen. You talk about burning carbon as though it were there waiting to be burned. When you're burning a substance, you're not doing anything on the elemental level, you're only breaking and making chemical bonds. Since the vast majority of hydrogen in oil is bonded to carbon (Try CH8O8 as an example. Octane, IIRC.), a weak bond, getting hydrogen from oil is a simple and cheap process. (At least, in terms of energy.)
And considering that most of the energy output from the process came from the fuel at the input, your (energy applied)/(energy retrieved) is well in excess of 100%. You can't say the same thing about electrolysis or even plasmafication of water.
(Disclamer, before someone throws the laws of thermodynamics at me, note that most of the energy in the output of the process is stored in the fuel being processed, which is not included when considering the energy applied.)
Big and slow? You'd be amazed at how fast their engines can push those things through water. My step dad (a fire controlman) was ordered to clear his radar screen when the group his ship was in spread out because of a MiG sighting. The XO didn't want anyone else in the room to realize what it meant when those little blips could move off the screen so quickly.
We never advertised. Our client base grew through word of mouth. We kept a low turnover rate that way.
I would have gladly written a RADIUS server that did the kind of accounting they wanted. I would have gladly moved the email system from NT to Linux. And the web server.
We were a pre-pay service. No billing. Dial-up only. We were blacklisted a couple of times, but got it straightened out quickly.
The ISP was never profitable. It wasn't ever intended to be...it was the continuation of a BBS that started in 1987, and most users stuck around for four or five years at a time.
The owners beleived in a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" paradigm, and for a long time we didn't have any sort of spam filtering because we considered it "censorship." And a lot of our customers staid with us for that reason.
The last owners bought the system in 1998, and fed it the money it needed until it had to fold last month. (They had to fold because SBC had been billing them several times what they should have been for eighteen months. Billing disputes were to no avail, and they couldn't afford to maintain a court battle.)
We were a small dial-up ISP. No way in hell we could afford to keep those kinds of logs. We had to keep clearing error logs off our NT box in order to have enough space for the email.
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I started journal entry to continue this discussion. You're invited to participate.
Can't find any other way to contact you online...I started a journal entry to continue this discussion...I'm sending invitations to some of the participants, and asking one of them to tone down the personal nature of his comments.
When it comes to politics, nobody's stupid. Especially in cases where they think something is black/white.
Rather, they simply haven't had enough experience to show them otherwise. That's not immaturity, that's life. I was raised in an extremely conservative family, and it was a long time before I became as liberal as I tend to be now. ("Independant" label be damned, I'm liberal on some topics and conservative on others, just like everyone else. Unless a person never has to say "Well, that's different" to any scenario he's charged with, he's independant.)
ratamacue's views are just as valid as yours or mine, they're just brought on by different amounts and types of experience.
They ought to take advice from Robot Wars developers...how to get yourself out of sticky physical situations, etc.
I disagree completely. The presence of people would make missions much more likely to succeed in a variable environment. There's nothing like a good engineer's ingenuity, a screwdriver and a soldering iron to get out of a tight spot.
Marswalks ought to be much simpler and easier than spacewalks, so repairs should go a lot faster.
Point taken on the oil-cracker. I'm no expert. However, I didn't say that carbon couldn't be burned, I said that it was already involved in existing chemical bonds.
I like your analysis...I'll pass on misis.org for now.
I suppose I meant, if the current government, law structure and legal precedents were landed on, say, a Libertarian President, how would things improve?
What I didn't get is, if Arthur was supposed to have been descended from the aliens that landed on the planet, why did Zaphod believe he knew The Question that follows from 42?
How would libtarianism deal with powerful civilian organisations like Microsoft?
If you're lucky, you can use chemical catalysts to perform chemical changes on a substance while expending virtually no energy. That's what a catalytic converter does in a normal unleaded-fuel automobile.
You can't just add a gas truck to a convoy and say, "Oh yeah, and you guys have to protect him (jearking a thumb)" ... The entire process and strategy, defense plan and whatnot have to be written to include the truck.
I would assume they'd send a bit of fuel with every vehicle, so that tactical costs were reduced, and so that losses in case of an attack were reduced. (How many video games have "destroy the (rich target)" as a mission objective?)
However, I do take your point about it being possible to tack on costs. I just don't think it applies as much in this scenario.
If you drive a tanker, it's going to have about a foot of armor around it. My guess it that they transport it in much smaller chunks. For one, that increases tactical capabilities. For two, it minimizes your losses if part of a convoy gets taken out.
Not quite correct...The instability of a substance represents how readily it will convert to another substance. The fact that you can burn oil at all shows that it only requires heat and oxygen to break it down. And that means you provide a little energy to get much more out.
Water doesn't burn at all in oxygen. You talk about burning carbon as though it were there waiting to be burned. When you're burning a substance, you're not doing anything on the elemental level, you're only breaking and making chemical bonds. Since the vast majority of hydrogen in oil is bonded to carbon (Try CH8O8 as an example. Octane, IIRC.), a weak bond, getting hydrogen from oil is a simple and cheap process. (At least, in terms of energy.)
And considering that most of the energy output from the process came from the fuel at the input, your (energy applied)/(energy retrieved) is well in excess of 100%. You can't say the same thing about electrolysis or even plasmafication of water.
(Disclamer, before someone throws the laws of thermodynamics at me, note that most of the energy in the output of the process is stored in the fuel being processed, which is not included when considering the energy applied.)
Big and slow? You'd be amazed at how fast their engines can push those things through water. My step dad (a fire controlman) was ordered to clear his radar screen when the group his ship was in spread out because of a MiG sighting. The XO didn't want anyone else in the room to realize what it meant when those little blips could move off the screen so quickly.
Yes and no, I think. It would let them pack more fuel into the same space, but would also let them pack more armor around the tank.
They wouldn't let me "fix" stuff...
We never advertised. Our client base grew through word of mouth. We kept a low turnover rate that way.
I would have gladly written a RADIUS server that did the kind of accounting they wanted. I would have gladly moved the email system from NT to Linux. And the web server.
About the only thing we ran under Linux was DNS.
Well, yeah. But that doesn't mean they record every assignmenent.
We were a pre-pay service. No billing. Dial-up only. We were blacklisted a couple of times, but got it straightened out quickly.
The ISP was never profitable. It wasn't ever intended to be...it was the continuation of a BBS that started in 1987, and most users stuck around for four or five years at a time.
The owners beleived in a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" paradigm, and for a long time we didn't have any sort of spam filtering because we considered it "censorship." And a lot of our customers staid with us for that reason.
The last owners bought the system in 1998, and fed it the money it needed until it had to fold last month. (They had to fold because SBC had been billing them several times what they should have been for eighteen months. Billing disputes were to no avail, and they couldn't afford to maintain a court battle.)
Assuming you're on ethernet. If you're connected PPP, you still have a MAC addres, but it's software based..
There're very few ways they could monitor IPs for traffic, so there's a good chance a lot of those are from PPP connections.
Anyone care to do a reverse dns on all those IPs? I don't have a *nix box handy to do it.
We were a small dial-up ISP. No way in hell we could afford to keep those kinds of logs. We had to keep clearing error logs off our NT box in order to have enough space for the email.
Well, for a while I was running a 166MHz laptop. Java seemed OK to me. But experimenting with developing for KDE was a real bitch.
I forgot to mention...I was doing it for free, for the family business. (ISP)
My college campus is Windows only. Even the central Linux server for our UNIX classes is run under VMWare.
I was elated today when I came across GNU tools precompiled for Windows, on the network. (the ones I crosscompiled with MinGW didn't work.)
Oh, the beauty of being able to type what's natural (ls) and not get "Command not found in path"
My excitement died down when I was called away to answer questions. And I've been called away twice while trying to type this comment in.
Well, as a tech support rep, I was DDOS'd once.