Getting rid of heat by dumping it into the ground is a great idea.
The problem is, you're dumping heat into your house's slab, not the ground. You need to put the pipes several feet underground.
All this is is a mild underfloor heating system. If that's what you're trying to achieve, ok, but if you're also paying for air conditioning to remove heat from the house, this is probably not worth it.
All diesels in the 70s where gutless. Heck simple truth was all cars in the US in the 70s where pretty gutless. The 70s was when we where trying to get emission controls to work and computers for controlling fuel injection and spark where primitive or just not available.
This is true. The basic scientific research on how to control automobile exhaust emissions was incomplete at the time, and the engine controls available were too primitive. This isn't anyone's fault - technology just hadn't caught up to the needs of the time. The only way to do it was to lower compression ratios, and reduce the camshaft profiles. The pellet-bed catalytic converters of the time were horribly restrictive also. About the only good thing that happened to car engines in the 1970s was the advent of good electronic ignition systems.
Turbochargers were not in wide use (or production) for cars, so there were very few turbodiesel cars (mostly MB) due to the cost of the turbo itself. Normally aspirated diesels aren't exactly exciting to drive. (Trivia - when the Porsche 911 Turbo came out, parts of the turbo system were made by Lycoming, the aircraft engine company, because there weren't any suitable automotive turbo parts available.)
GM got such a bad rap on the diesel and for the most part it was unfair.
That's not totally true. There were some basic design mistakes, and a cost cutting decision you mentioned that were the downfall of the Oldsmobile diesel.
The GM diesel where sold to people that didn't know how to maintain them and by dealers that really didn't know how to maintain them. People that bought a 300D where used to paying Hans the big bucks. Olds buyers where not.
Actually, a Mercedes diesel of the time required very little maintenance (on the engine at least). Oil, coolant and filter (air/fuel/oil) changes, and that's about it. You could do it all in your driveway.
Also GM didn't put in a water separator. That was shouldn't have been an issue but right then quality of diesel went to crap and you had a lot of failed injector pumps.
Again MB was used to crap fuel and put in the extra filtering needed.
This was a big problem. All diesel fuel accumulates water eventually. Diesel fuel has a lubricity requirement - because it must also lubricate the high pressure injection pump. Water is not a good lubricant. Leaving out the water separator was a cost cutting decision GM would not repeat. The later Chevrolet (designed in collaboration with Detroit Diesel) 6.2/6.5 V8 came with one, and even a warning light on the dash to indicate that there was a buildup of water in the fuel (you would then have to open a valve and drain the water out of the separator.
The problems weren't all maintenance-related. The GM 350 diesel (and the lesser-known 4.3V6 diesel used in the front-wheel-drive A-body cars, unrelated to the later Chevrolet 4.3 gas V6) was designed by reusing parts from the Oldsmobile gas V8. The blocks were made using a high-nickel iron alloy and are very strong - they're often bought from the junkyards by drag racers who want to use them as the basis to build very high powered gas engines. The cylinder heads and crankshafts were pretty much stretching the design limits of the materials they were made of, since they were designed under budget constraints. Cracked heads and broken crankshafts were not uncommon. There are tolerances in the alloy compositions (this is just a fact of life, not a GM problem) - because of this some engines got stronger crankshafts and cylinder heads (basically by chance), and there are quite a few 5.7 diesels still running around. I have a friend who was driving a 1980 Oldsmobile 98 Diesel until a few years ago when the body started to rust out.
The later 6.2/6.5 engines were very durable, because they were designed from the ground up to be diesels.
It is unfortunate that GMs design errors stained the diesel in the US
Why is it that in this day and age the movement of the market (and the whole underpinnings of the global economy) is based on things like the perception of how someone wrote a press release?
It's because investors and speculators are indeed crazy. People are sheep.
My parents told me a story of how my grandmother flagged them down as they were driving down the street one day. They pulled over and my grandmother came over to the car, looked around to make sure nobody would overhear the sage investment advice she was about to reveal, and said "pepper's going scarce".
There was a rumor amongst all the old ladies in town that there was a shortage of pepper, and so they were rushing out to the stores to buy all the pepper they could before it ran out. For a week or so, there was a real shortage of pepper in that city, because of all the old people rushing to buy it.
Compare that to what happens to the retail price of fossil fuels when something just as ridiculous happens, and you can see that the people who have influence over the price of things are just a collection of irrational sheep. Once you realize that, it becomes clear as to how you can influence markets and prices if you have some money to invest in the right place or if you can say the right words in front of enough people.
Really I was just being picky in my second point -- the drive's parts will not end up split into their elemental components. Even if they do, they'd rapidly recombine into new compounds, since the chemical reactions do not happen in isolation. Many elements are not found in pure forms in nature for this reason. Certainly much of the aluminum will oxidize, for example.
I work with metallurgists and chemical engineers in the metals industry, and I'm pretty sure if you expose a hard drive to extremely high temperatures in air, most of the components are going to end up as oxides, not pure elements. In melting of metals one of the standard chemical processes that is done to the molten metal is deoxidation (in iron and steel, pieces of aluminum are thrown into the furnace because the aluminum has such an affinity for oxygen that it will soak it up from the iron or steel and form an oxide slag that can be scraped off the top of the melt.
My suggestion to eliminate oxidation by removing the air from the foundry and having the workers wear space suits didn't go over all that well, although the engineers did have to admit that it would solve a lot of problems.
I do like the new word you've taught me today "besserwisser".
A small terracotta pot without a hole in the bottom of it + a small amount of thermite is the cheapest way, thermite is cheap and reasonably easy to make.
Ok, do that in your office and see how many minutes your job lasts once the fire's out.
Even if we did it outside at my place of work, we'd get complaints from the neighbors. A mechanical/hydraulic crusher/bender thing could be made into something that looks like an office appliance.
Nothing says "no data recovery" like a drive reduced to its elemental components.
Except it's not. Burning is generally a process of rapidly combining reactants, not dividing them up. Plus, it's rather environmentally unfriendly - having a cloud of smoke go up is frowned upon in most places these days.
In high school I took a class like that, except it was at a much lower level - we actually worked towards the design of a 4-bit microprocessor based on discrete logic gates and flip flops. We started with simple AND, OR, NOR, NAND gates, the different types of flip flops, moving to using Karnaugh maps to design logic, and covering simple CPU design - things like bus registers.
I remember one week's project was to design and build a hex matrix keypad - it was pretty neat to build something like that out of 74-series logic on a breadboard and actually have it work. I used a string of three inverters (1/4 each of a 7404) with the output of the last inverter feeding back into the input of the first, as my keypad's clock generator. The teacher was surprised it worked, and even more surprised that the 74-series logic was running at 24MHz (this was 1988, and the fastest computer we had in the lab ran at 6MHz).
I also remember building a 7-segment LED display driver circuit, and things like adders and shift registers.
I think the only reason our school was able to offer this class was because there was a State program that offered grants to high schools to improve their electronics labs. The total grant money available for the entire state was $150,000. We were told that the electronics teacher at the school was the only applicant for the grant program and our school had been awarded the entire $150,000. Needless to say, the electronics lab at my high school was better equipped than some university labs I've seen.
If you tried riding a bike with fixed handlebars you would fall over just as fast as if you were stopped, which wouldn't happen if gyroscopic effects were dominant.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. You're right about the minimal gyroscopic effect, but turning the handlebars is not the only type of steering input that works.
I've seen a motorcycle ridden with locked steering - and to make a motorcycle swerve you push the handlebars left or right without actually turning them. It works because steering a two-wheeled vehicle uses the effect of riding on the off-center part of the tire tread (it's also why motorcycle and even bike tires have a round profile. It's a little hard to explain, but you can simulate it on your desk by rolling a coin - when the coin begins to fall over, it turns in the direction of the lean.
I can easily see playing this game in 1983. The game logic is simple enough, it makes you wonder why nobody thought of it back then.
I'm not sure if the apple II's would have the horsepower to pull of the "spins" though;)
No problem! Written in 6502 assembler, I don't think it would have been that hard. You'd probably have to come up with a delay to make the spins slow enough.
It's just a question of coming up with a clever trick - I had a friend in high school who would have looked at the spin as a neat challenge and probably he would have had it coded and running over a weekend...
It would have been a little slow if you used the "high resolution" graphics mode, but in text mode (or low resolution graphics mode, which was the addressed the same way as text mode) the only stumbling block was Woz's crazy screen buffer addressing scheme, which you can get around with some simple math or a smallish lookup table (I believe there's a screen address calculation routine in the ROM, if you want to be lazy - you could use it to populate nice fast lookup tables for each phase of the spin). If you're not using hi-res graphics there's plenty of memory space.
There are still a few games for the Apple II that leave you wondering how they did what they did with so little computing power and memory space.
I wouldn't want to ride in a Buick Grand National doing over 200MPH. Seriously, that car is based on the Buick Regal, a car designed for the regular driving public to drive around town at "normal" speeds. It'd probably be quite dangerous at anything north of 140. The factory did no optimization of the aerodynamics or the suspension for those kinds of speeds.
Furthermore, the car in the video is modified within an inch of its life. You'll notice that there aren't even any air filters on the turbo intakes, and it sounds like there isn't much of an exhaust system. Also, chances are good that the drivetrain would self destruct pretty rapidly if the maximum power output was achieved for more than a few seconds.
The Veyron, on the other hand, can hold its maximum speed until the tires self destruct (about 14 minutes, I think), and it can be driven in traffic without worrying about dirt damaging the engine, or having to yell over the sound of the engine. If someone made tires that would survive longer at those speeds you'd only be limited by the length of the road and the fuel tank capacity. Still, wouldn't it be cheaper to buy into something like Netjets if you need to get somewhere that fast?
The Buick Grand National was a neat car for its time (with a whopping, what 245HP stock?), and people have gotten impressive power and fuel economy out of them, but it's not really comparable to the Veyron.
It looks similar in size to the G-Wiz, an all-electric car which can only be legally driven in the UK because it's not classed as a "car", it's a "quadricycle". Quadricycles are basically thought of as a four-wheel motorcycle, so there are almost no safety requirements.
There is little to no chance of these being legal to drive in an US state, other than those that allow "neighborhood vehicles", like golf carts and Japanese Kei-class cars - here in Ilinois you can drive those on streets that have a maximum speed limit of 35 MPH, but no faster.
I especially recommend Clarkson's G-Wiz review. The G-Wiz is beaten by a table in the drag race test. Golf carts move faster and are roomier.
I have to agree that the Mighty Mouse right click is terrible.
But, I have noticed that when I right click in Windows XP under VMWare Fusion, it behaves much better. It would seem that the Mac OS is doing a bad job of handling the Mighty Mouse's right clicks.
The scroll ball sucks. Someday they'll change it to an optical sensor combined with a touch sensor so it only detects movement when you're actually touching it.
Meanwhile, I wish I could replace my Apple keyboard with a Model M and retain all of the fancy function key controls.
If this post is correctly using the term/acronym cfl, then they are referring to the high frequency lights that fit in modern bulb sockets. Old school ballasts for florescent tubes that we are used to in schools and office buildings would never fit, and as far as i know don't exist in this form factor.
There are CFL fixtures that have separate ballasts. They're usually only seen in older commercial installations. The ones I had to deal with had a simple magnetic ballast (not a mechanical ballast, there's no such thing), and when you replaced the lamp it was just a specially packaged fluorescent tube with no electronics.
The term "CFL" was used by the manufacturers; the lamp was a GE Biax, and you could change the wattage by just changing the tube. When we sold the building I kept the stock of replacement tubes since I was able to pick up a ballast/socket adapter that would screw into a regular lamp fixture. Worked great in the garage, but I wouldn't use them in the living room due to flicker.
I remember buying a replacement ballast for one fixture. It was basically a simple inductor, and remarkably inexpensive. There was basically no way to convert the fixtures over to electronic ballasts, but there wasn't any point since they were used as hallway lights in an office building.
I have replaced magnetic ballasts in the old-style 4 foot office fixtures with electronic ballasts, but it's generally a better idea to replace the whole fixture. The socket terminals oxidize over time, and the sockets get brittle with age. Retrofits only make sense in a commercial environment where you'd have to replace a large number of fixtures and the small saving by replacing only the ballasts add up.
From the abstract linked to about antibiotics not being effective for sinusitis:
Antibiotics provide a minor improvement in simple (uncomplicated) sinus infections. However, 8 out of 10 patients improve without antibiotics within two weeks. The small benefit gained may be overridden by the negative effects of antibiotics, both on the patient and on the population in general.
Well, I get sinusitis once or twice a year. I'm one of the 2 out of 10 patients for whom antibiotics are apparently totally necessary. I once had my sinusitis go for over six months with no sign of it abating until I took antibiotics. As an aside, yes, I probably should have gone to the doctor sooner, but it just seemed like a mild head cold until other systematic problems from the infection showed up.
You'll also note that the paper describes only one type of sinusitis (acute maxillary sinusitis), which the summary then expands to all "sinusitis". So, it's not accurate to say that antibiotics are not effective against "sinusitis", because the flip side is that they are effective and necessary in 20% of maxillary sinusitis patients.
Obviously fake knee surgery is just fraud unless the surgeon does it for free, but some of the treatments do work for some patients in which the conditions aren't resolving themselves. The question is, which patients and which treatments?
Inflammation from my low grade sinus infection eventually caused crazy autoimmune problems which almost landed me in the hospital. Antibiotics cured the infection in 10 days, but the secondary conditions took five specialists to figure out (at one point I heard two of them arguing about what I had). I was off work and in pain for about two months while things healed up. Had I seen the doctor early on, a week of antibiotics would have cured the infection before anything else happened.
From the tone of the summary and article, what I get is that the author thinks maybe health care costs could be cut if we stop treating people who may not respond to the treatment - but the real issue is that some of these common treatments that are not necessary for every patient could be 100% necessary for some of the patients.
Personally, I think the Queen's gift is the worst out of all those listed (in all the linked articles) anyway - it's too imperialist and overbearing... a signed photo... "Look, I have given you something cheap and readily available to remind you that you were once in my presence". Urk.
Yeah, she hands one of those things to everyone who walks past Buckingham Palace. I've got four of the damned things already. She won't take no for an answer, you have to take the thing or she yells at you and has her guards chase you away. At least you can melt the silver frame down and make some money. </sarcasm>
Are you serious? Regardless of the expense, or lack of it (it's probably a very expensive frame, not something from the Hallmark store), a signed photograph of Liz II is not a common item.
And, if you think about it, if you're in her position, meeting some dignitary or other literally every other day, you'd probably standardize on some gift like that too.
Maybe the Obama White House should consider doing something similar (although a signed photo is probably not a good idea for someone who isn't a monarch).
I do have to wonder what an 80-something year old who has staff to do everything for her is going to do with an iPod. Doesn't seem like all that great an idea.
As in, shake the instant photo to help it develop.
The funny part is, the shaking never really helped the photo develop. It just did the user something to do while the chemicals did their work.
My mother had a Polaroid instant camera in the UK and we had never heard of shaking the pictures until we came to the US. It seemed as stupid as shaking a bottle of water to make it more watery or something.
It's not called slavery if you get fairly compensated for the loss of freedom.
No, it's called being an indentured servant.
We don't want anything smarter than us in charge of us, because it or they may decide we're much safer without our freedoms than with them.
There are many things that make life worthwhile, that present obvious risks to us, yet without the freedom to do things like take risks, life could become very much like being in prison.
Certainly, the introduction of language in addition to farming would have been a huge cultural leap over the existing hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Hunter gatherers don't have language already?
The natives featured in the series finale of BSG were "pre-lingual", without language. One of the main characters said so as they were observing them.
Think about it, you do don't need much more than a few gestures and grunts to organize a hunt or point out the location of some particularly delectable berries.
I have to say, the finale left me a little disappointed. There was a lot of action, but once that finished they had some minor impact on humanity and all went off and died some time later. I loved the whole show from miniseries to series finale, but it did leave me wanting something more. An explanation of who "it", "god" is, and what it's playing at. Presumably angels Six and Baltar weren't just observing modern Earth for exposition.
So, it is possible that all the Colonists except Hera die off quickly, but it's not necessary.
Hera's hybrid biology must have represented an evolutionary advantage in order for her mitochondrial DNA to be successfully passed down over 150,000 years to modern humans.
It is possible that that advantage would not be realized until many generations later - for example if a hundred generations later, her descendants are the only people who have resistance to some new disease they encounter, and everyone else who does not posses her mitochondrial DNA dies from the plague.
It does seem likely that most of the Colonists die off quickly or have little impact on the native peoples in terms of culture.
Think about it - if 150,000 years ago farming and things like that had been introduced and it had actually taken, isn't it likely that mankind would be a lot more advanced now? We might have had an industrial revolution 100,000 years ago instead of 150 years ago.
Certainly, the introduction of language in addition to farming would have been a huge cultural leap over the existing hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
If we 'teach' people to ignore warnings that their car is losing tractions, such as wheel vibration, we are taking an active role killing people.
Wheel vibration isn't a useful signal that the car is about to lose traction. It's already "taken" by other problems: It's a signal that a tire has blown out, or you have a wheel out of balance, a misaligned front suspension, a severe engine misfire, or a very cheap car.
Making the wheel vibrate artificially to signal the edge of available traction only makes sense if the rest of the car is in ideal condition (including design).
The big yellow triangle with exclamation point that flashes in the middle of my Mercedes' speedometer is a much better indicator. You really can't miss it, and it can't be mistaken for some other minor problem.
Good idea, but most mobile internet Terms of Service specifically prohibit using it as a "replacement for a landline" (WTF?)
Some even throttle you back (for a month or so) if they've seen too much traffic on one tower for too long.
So far in my experience, Sprint does not throttle, cap or limit.
They have something in their TOS about not using it to replace a landline, but I've had my Sprint card plugged into a Linksys WRT54G3G-ST for over a year on their $59.99/month unlimited business plan (the "business" part may be important, but you're a home business, right?) and I can report that it pretty much is unlimited, and they've never throttled it.
One time I glanced at the usage part of the bill and wrote in the commas to separate the thousands, millions and billions on the "bytes used" - it came to something like 5TB that month.
If you think about it, you're not using it to replace a landline, you're using it as something better.
For some, "take the bus" means losing 4 hours a day for what would be a 30-minute trip. That's 4 hours they can use to hold down a 2nd job or be their for their children.
For others who live in cities without mass transit, "take the bus" means moving.
Did you know there it at least one city in America with over 1/3 of a million residents but no public transit system?
What part of this justifies allowing uninsured drivers on the road?
None of it. You may not think this is an important issue right now, but once you or someone you car about has been injured or had their car destroyed by some uninsured idiot, you do.
If you want to rant about the lack of useful public transportation, fair enough, but the GP was correct in saying that uninsured motorists cannot afford the price of being road users, and they unfairly burden the majority of road users who do obey the law and conscientiously maintain liability insurance on their vehicles.
Why should we pay for the cost of someone else's inability to insure their car? I assert that we should not, and that they should not be on the road.
If you think about it, if they sold their (uninsured) car and moved someplace where they could use public transportation, they'd probably be ahead. They'd no longer be paying for registration, fuel or parking, and they'd never get a traffic ticket or risk being cited for not having insurance (an automatic $500 fine where I live - I pay less than $500 for a year's insurance on one of my cars). Sounds like a pretty good deal.
Wouldn't blurring out government buildings, churches and schools simply highlight their locations on the maps?
If he's concerned about building details being shown, you have to wonder why. For example, what good does knowing where the skylights on a school do for a terrorist? Very little.
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"aren't aloud" is obviously some legal term for not being allowed to speak aloud in court to get outside information. As in "The jury aren't aloud."
It's obvious to anyone willing to take guesses at legal terminology.
I'm pretty sure "res ipsa" is a refreshing fruit-flavored beverage served in the judge's chambers.
I'll not mention what the judge's "chambers" means, since this is a family-friendly discussion.
ha ha!
Getting rid of heat by dumping it into the ground is a great idea.
The problem is, you're dumping heat into your house's slab, not the ground. You need to put the pipes several feet underground.
All this is is a mild underfloor heating system. If that's what you're trying to achieve, ok, but if you're also paying for air conditioning to remove heat from the house, this is probably not worth it.
Houses have been built with copper pipes and steel rebar and rewire in the slab for decades now without any electrolytic effects showing up.
Once the concrete is cured, it is no longer an electrolyte. Concrete is not a great electrical insulator, but it's not a great conductor either.
All diesels in the 70s where gutless. Heck simple truth was all cars in the US in the 70s where pretty gutless. The 70s was when we where trying to get emission controls to work and computers for controlling fuel injection and spark where primitive or just not available.
This is true. The basic scientific research on how to control automobile exhaust emissions was incomplete at the time, and the engine controls available were too primitive. This isn't anyone's fault - technology just hadn't caught up to the needs of the time. The only way to do it was to lower compression ratios, and reduce the camshaft profiles. The pellet-bed catalytic converters of the time were horribly restrictive also. About the only good thing that happened to car engines in the 1970s was the advent of good electronic ignition systems. Turbochargers were not in wide use (or production) for cars, so there were very few turbodiesel cars (mostly MB) due to the cost of the turbo itself. Normally aspirated diesels aren't exactly exciting to drive. (Trivia - when the Porsche 911 Turbo came out, parts of the turbo system were made by Lycoming, the aircraft engine company, because there weren't any suitable automotive turbo parts available.)
GM got such a bad rap on the diesel and for the most part it was unfair.
That's not totally true. There were some basic design mistakes, and a cost cutting decision you mentioned that were the downfall of the Oldsmobile diesel.
The GM diesel where sold to people that didn't know how to maintain them and by dealers that really didn't know how to maintain them. People that bought a 300D where used to paying Hans the big bucks. Olds buyers where not.
Actually, a Mercedes diesel of the time required very little maintenance (on the engine at least). Oil, coolant and filter (air/fuel/oil) changes, and that's about it. You could do it all in your driveway.
Also GM didn't put in a water separator. That was shouldn't have been an issue but right then quality of diesel went to crap and you had a lot of failed injector pumps. Again MB was used to crap fuel and put in the extra filtering needed.
This was a big problem. All diesel fuel accumulates water eventually. Diesel fuel has a lubricity requirement - because it must also lubricate the high pressure injection pump. Water is not a good lubricant. Leaving out the water separator was a cost cutting decision GM would not repeat. The later Chevrolet (designed in collaboration with Detroit Diesel) 6.2/6.5 V8 came with one, and even a warning light on the dash to indicate that there was a buildup of water in the fuel (you would then have to open a valve and drain the water out of the separator.
The problems weren't all maintenance-related. The GM 350 diesel (and the lesser-known 4.3V6 diesel used in the front-wheel-drive A-body cars, unrelated to the later Chevrolet 4.3 gas V6) was designed by reusing parts from the Oldsmobile gas V8. The blocks were made using a high-nickel iron alloy and are very strong - they're often bought from the junkyards by drag racers who want to use them as the basis to build very high powered gas engines. The cylinder heads and crankshafts were pretty much stretching the design limits of the materials they were made of, since they were designed under budget constraints. Cracked heads and broken crankshafts were not uncommon. There are tolerances in the alloy compositions (this is just a fact of life, not a GM problem) - because of this some engines got stronger crankshafts and cylinder heads (basically by chance), and there are quite a few 5.7 diesels still running around. I have a friend who was driving a 1980 Oldsmobile 98 Diesel until a few years ago when the body started to rust out.
The later 6.2/6.5 engines were very durable, because they were designed from the ground up to be diesels.
It is unfortunate that GMs design errors stained the diesel in the US
Why is it that in this day and age the movement of the market (and the whole underpinnings of the global economy) is based on things like the perception of how someone wrote a press release?
It's because investors and speculators are indeed crazy. People are sheep.
My parents told me a story of how my grandmother flagged them down as they were driving down the street one day. They pulled over and my grandmother came over to the car, looked around to make sure nobody would overhear the sage investment advice she was about to reveal, and said "pepper's going scarce".
There was a rumor amongst all the old ladies in town that there was a shortage of pepper, and so they were rushing out to the stores to buy all the pepper they could before it ran out. For a week or so, there was a real shortage of pepper in that city, because of all the old people rushing to buy it.
Compare that to what happens to the retail price of fossil fuels when something just as ridiculous happens, and you can see that the people who have influence over the price of things are just a collection of irrational sheep. Once you realize that, it becomes clear as to how you can influence markets and prices if you have some money to invest in the right place or if you can say the right words in front of enough people.
Really I was just being picky in my second point -- the drive's parts will not end up split into their elemental components. Even if they do, they'd rapidly recombine into new compounds, since the chemical reactions do not happen in isolation. Many elements are not found in pure forms in nature for this reason. Certainly much of the aluminum will oxidize, for example.
I work with metallurgists and chemical engineers in the metals industry, and I'm pretty sure if you expose a hard drive to extremely high temperatures in air, most of the components are going to end up as oxides, not pure elements. In melting of metals one of the standard chemical processes that is done to the molten metal is deoxidation (in iron and steel, pieces of aluminum are thrown into the furnace because the aluminum has such an affinity for oxygen that it will soak it up from the iron or steel and form an oxide slag that can be scraped off the top of the melt.
My suggestion to eliminate oxidation by removing the air from the foundry and having the workers wear space suits didn't go over all that well, although the engineers did have to admit that it would solve a lot of problems.
I do like the new word you've taught me today "besserwisser".
Which would be the better solution.
A small terracotta pot without a hole in the bottom of it + a small amount of thermite is the cheapest way, thermite is cheap and reasonably easy to make.
Ok, do that in your office and see how many minutes your job lasts once the fire's out.
Even if we did it outside at my place of work, we'd get complaints from the neighbors. A mechanical/hydraulic crusher/bender thing could be made into something that looks like an office appliance.
Nothing says "no data recovery" like a drive reduced to its elemental components.
Except it's not. Burning is generally a process of rapidly combining reactants, not dividing them up. Plus, it's rather environmentally unfriendly - having a cloud of smoke go up is frowned upon in most places these days.
In high school I took a class like that, except it was at a much lower level - we actually worked towards the design of a 4-bit microprocessor based on discrete logic gates and flip flops. We started with simple AND, OR, NOR, NAND gates, the different types of flip flops, moving to using Karnaugh maps to design logic, and covering simple CPU design - things like bus registers.
I remember one week's project was to design and build a hex matrix keypad - it was pretty neat to build something like that out of 74-series logic on a breadboard and actually have it work. I used a string of three inverters (1/4 each of a 7404) with the output of the last inverter feeding back into the input of the first, as my keypad's clock generator. The teacher was surprised it worked, and even more surprised that the 74-series logic was running at 24MHz (this was 1988, and the fastest computer we had in the lab ran at 6MHz).
I also remember building a 7-segment LED display driver circuit, and things like adders and shift registers.
I think the only reason our school was able to offer this class was because there was a State program that offered grants to high schools to improve their electronics labs. The total grant money available for the entire state was $150,000. We were told that the electronics teacher at the school was the only applicant for the grant program and our school had been awarded the entire $150,000. Needless to say, the electronics lab at my high school was better equipped than some university labs I've seen.
If you tried riding a bike with fixed handlebars you would fall over just as fast as if you were stopped, which wouldn't happen if gyroscopic effects were dominant.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. You're right about the minimal gyroscopic effect, but turning the handlebars is not the only type of steering input that works.
I've seen a motorcycle ridden with locked steering - and to make a motorcycle swerve you push the handlebars left or right without actually turning them. It works because steering a two-wheeled vehicle uses the effect of riding on the off-center part of the tire tread (it's also why motorcycle and even bike tires have a round profile. It's a little hard to explain, but you can simulate it on your desk by rolling a coin - when the coin begins to fall over, it turns in the direction of the lean.
I can easily see playing this game in 1983. The game logic is simple enough, it makes you wonder why nobody thought of it back then.
I'm not sure if the apple II's would have the horsepower to pull of the "spins" though ;)
No problem! Written in 6502 assembler, I don't think it would have been that hard. You'd probably have to come up with a delay to make the spins slow enough.
It's just a question of coming up with a clever trick - I had a friend in high school who would have looked at the spin as a neat challenge and probably he would have had it coded and running over a weekend...
It would have been a little slow if you used the "high resolution" graphics mode, but in text mode (or low resolution graphics mode, which was the addressed the same way as text mode) the only stumbling block was Woz's crazy screen buffer addressing scheme, which you can get around with some simple math or a smallish lookup table (I believe there's a screen address calculation routine in the ROM, if you want to be lazy - you could use it to populate nice fast lookup tables for each phase of the spin). If you're not using hi-res graphics there's plenty of memory space.
There are still a few games for the Apple II that leave you wondering how they did what they did with so little computing power and memory space.
I wouldn't want to ride in a Buick Grand National doing over 200MPH. Seriously, that car is based on the Buick Regal, a car designed for the regular driving public to drive around town at "normal" speeds. It'd probably be quite dangerous at anything north of 140. The factory did no optimization of the aerodynamics or the suspension for those kinds of speeds.
Furthermore, the car in the video is modified within an inch of its life. You'll notice that there aren't even any air filters on the turbo intakes, and it sounds like there isn't much of an exhaust system. Also, chances are good that the drivetrain would self destruct pretty rapidly if the maximum power output was achieved for more than a few seconds.
The Veyron, on the other hand, can hold its maximum speed until the tires self destruct (about 14 minutes, I think), and it can be driven in traffic without worrying about dirt damaging the engine, or having to yell over the sound of the engine. If someone made tires that would survive longer at those speeds you'd only be limited by the length of the road and the fuel tank capacity. Still, wouldn't it be cheaper to buy into something like Netjets if you need to get somewhere that fast?
The Buick Grand National was a neat car for its time (with a whopping, what 245HP stock?), and people have gotten impressive power and fuel economy out of them, but it's not really comparable to the Veyron.
It looks similar in size to the G-Wiz, an all-electric car which can only be legally driven in the UK because it's not classed as a "car", it's a "quadricycle". Quadricycles are basically thought of as a four-wheel motorcycle, so there are almost no safety requirements.
There is little to no chance of these being legal to drive in an US state, other than those that allow "neighborhood vehicles", like golf carts and Japanese Kei-class cars - here in Ilinois you can drive those on streets that have a maximum speed limit of 35 MPH, but no faster.
I especially recommend Clarkson's G-Wiz review. The G-Wiz is beaten by a table in the drag race test. Golf carts move faster and are roomier.
I have to agree that the Mighty Mouse right click is terrible.
But, I have noticed that when I right click in Windows XP under VMWare Fusion, it behaves much better. It would seem that the Mac OS is doing a bad job of handling the Mighty Mouse's right clicks.
The scroll ball sucks. Someday they'll change it to an optical sensor combined with a touch sensor so it only detects movement when you're actually touching it.
Meanwhile, I wish I could replace my Apple keyboard with a Model M and retain all of the fancy function key controls.
If this post is correctly using the term/acronym cfl, then they are referring to the high frequency lights that fit in modern bulb sockets. Old school ballasts for florescent tubes that we are used to in schools and office buildings would never fit, and as far as i know don't exist in this form factor.
There are CFL fixtures that have separate ballasts. They're usually only seen in older commercial installations. The ones I had to deal with had a simple magnetic ballast (not a mechanical ballast, there's no such thing), and when you replaced the lamp it was just a specially packaged fluorescent tube with no electronics.
The term "CFL" was used by the manufacturers; the lamp was a GE Biax, and you could change the wattage by just changing the tube. When we sold the building I kept the stock of replacement tubes since I was able to pick up a ballast/socket adapter that would screw into a regular lamp fixture. Worked great in the garage, but I wouldn't use them in the living room due to flicker.
I remember buying a replacement ballast for one fixture. It was basically a simple inductor, and remarkably inexpensive. There was basically no way to convert the fixtures over to electronic ballasts, but there wasn't any point since they were used as hallway lights in an office building.
I have replaced magnetic ballasts in the old-style 4 foot office fixtures with electronic ballasts, but it's generally a better idea to replace the whole fixture. The socket terminals oxidize over time, and the sockets get brittle with age. Retrofits only make sense in a commercial environment where you'd have to replace a large number of fixtures and the small saving by replacing only the ballasts add up.
From the abstract linked to about antibiotics not being effective for sinusitis:
Antibiotics provide a minor improvement in simple (uncomplicated) sinus infections. However, 8 out of 10 patients improve without antibiotics within two weeks. The small benefit gained may be overridden by the negative effects of antibiotics, both on the patient and on the population in general.
Well, I get sinusitis once or twice a year. I'm one of the 2 out of 10 patients for whom antibiotics are apparently totally necessary. I once had my sinusitis go for over six months with no sign of it abating until I took antibiotics. As an aside, yes, I probably should have gone to the doctor sooner, but it just seemed like a mild head cold until other systematic problems from the infection showed up.
You'll also note that the paper describes only one type of sinusitis (acute maxillary sinusitis), which the summary then expands to all "sinusitis". So, it's not accurate to say that antibiotics are not effective against "sinusitis", because the flip side is that they are effective and necessary in 20% of maxillary sinusitis patients.
Obviously fake knee surgery is just fraud unless the surgeon does it for free, but some of the treatments do work for some patients in which the conditions aren't resolving themselves. The question is, which patients and which treatments?
Inflammation from my low grade sinus infection eventually caused crazy autoimmune problems which almost landed me in the hospital. Antibiotics cured the infection in 10 days, but the secondary conditions took five specialists to figure out (at one point I heard two of them arguing about what I had). I was off work and in pain for about two months while things healed up. Had I seen the doctor early on, a week of antibiotics would have cured the infection before anything else happened.
From the tone of the summary and article, what I get is that the author thinks maybe health care costs could be cut if we stop treating people who may not respond to the treatment - but the real issue is that some of these common treatments that are not necessary for every patient could be 100% necessary for some of the patients.
Personally, I think the Queen's gift is the worst out of all those listed (in all the linked articles) anyway - it's too imperialist and overbearing... a signed photo... "Look, I have given you something cheap and readily available to remind you that you were once in my presence". Urk.
Yeah, she hands one of those things to everyone who walks past Buckingham Palace. I've got four of the damned things already. She won't take no for an answer, you have to take the thing or she yells at you and has her guards chase you away. At least you can melt the silver frame down and make some money. </sarcasm>
Are you serious? Regardless of the expense, or lack of it (it's probably a very expensive frame, not something from the Hallmark store), a signed photograph of Liz II is not a common item.
And, if you think about it, if you're in her position, meeting some dignitary or other literally every other day, you'd probably standardize on some gift like that too.
Maybe the Obama White House should consider doing something similar (although a signed photo is probably not a good idea for someone who isn't a monarch).
I do have to wonder what an 80-something year old who has staff to do everything for her is going to do with an iPod. Doesn't seem like all that great an idea.
As in, shake the instant photo to help it develop.
The funny part is, the shaking never really helped the photo develop. It just did the user something to do while the chemicals did their work.
My mother had a Polaroid instant camera in the UK and we had never heard of shaking the pictures until we came to the US. It seemed as stupid as shaking a bottle of water to make it more watery or something.
It's not called slavery if you get fairly compensated for the loss of freedom.
No, it's called being an indentured servant.
We don't want anything smarter than us in charge of us, because it or they may decide we're much safer without our freedoms than with them.
There are many things that make life worthwhile, that present obvious risks to us, yet without the freedom to do things like take risks, life could become very much like being in prison.
Hunter gatherers don't have language already?
The natives featured in the series finale of BSG were "pre-lingual", without language. One of the main characters said so as they were observing them.
Think about it, you do don't need much more than a few gestures and grunts to organize a hunt or point out the location of some particularly delectable berries.
I have to say, the finale left me a little disappointed. There was a lot of action, but once that finished they had some minor impact on humanity and all went off and died some time later. I loved the whole show from miniseries to series finale, but it did leave me wanting something more. An explanation of who "it", "god" is, and what it's playing at. Presumably angels Six and Baltar weren't just observing modern Earth for exposition.
The natives were also her contemporaries.
So, it is possible that all the Colonists except Hera die off quickly, but it's not necessary.
Hera's hybrid biology must have represented an evolutionary advantage in order for her mitochondrial DNA to be successfully passed down over 150,000 years to modern humans.
It is possible that that advantage would not be realized until many generations later - for example if a hundred generations later, her descendants are the only people who have resistance to some new disease they encounter, and everyone else who does not posses her mitochondrial DNA dies from the plague.
It does seem likely that most of the Colonists die off quickly or have little impact on the native peoples in terms of culture.
Think about it - if 150,000 years ago farming and things like that had been introduced and it had actually taken, isn't it likely that mankind would be a lot more advanced now? We might have had an industrial revolution 100,000 years ago instead of 150 years ago.
Certainly, the introduction of language in addition to farming would have been a huge cultural leap over the existing hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
If we 'teach' people to ignore warnings that their car is losing tractions, such as wheel vibration, we are taking an active role killing people.
Wheel vibration isn't a useful signal that the car is about to lose traction. It's already "taken" by other problems: It's a signal that a tire has blown out, or you have a wheel out of balance, a misaligned front suspension, a severe engine misfire, or a very cheap car.
Making the wheel vibrate artificially to signal the edge of available traction only makes sense if the rest of the car is in ideal condition (including design).
The big yellow triangle with exclamation point that flashes in the middle of my Mercedes' speedometer is a much better indicator. You really can't miss it, and it can't be mistaken for some other minor problem.
Good idea, but most mobile internet Terms of Service specifically prohibit using it as a "replacement for a landline" (WTF?)
Some even throttle you back (for a month or so) if they've seen too much traffic on one tower for too long.
So far in my experience, Sprint does not throttle, cap or limit.
They have something in their TOS about not using it to replace a landline, but I've had my Sprint card plugged into a Linksys WRT54G3G-ST for over a year on their $59.99/month unlimited business plan (the "business" part may be important, but you're a home business, right?) and I can report that it pretty much is unlimited, and they've never throttled it.
One time I glanced at the usage part of the bill and wrote in the commas to separate the thousands, millions and billions on the "bytes used" - it came to something like 5TB that month.
If you think about it, you're not using it to replace a landline, you're using it as something better.
For some, "take the bus" means losing 4 hours a day for what would be a 30-minute trip. That's 4 hours they can use to hold down a 2nd job or be their for their children.
For others who live in cities without mass transit, "take the bus" means moving.
Did you know there it at least one city in America with over 1/3 of a million residents but no public transit system?
What part of this justifies allowing uninsured drivers on the road?
None of it. You may not think this is an important issue right now, but once you or someone you car about has been injured or had their car destroyed by some uninsured idiot, you do.
If you want to rant about the lack of useful public transportation, fair enough, but the GP was correct in saying that uninsured motorists cannot afford the price of being road users, and they unfairly burden the majority of road users who do obey the law and conscientiously maintain liability insurance on their vehicles.
Why should we pay for the cost of someone else's inability to insure their car? I assert that we should not, and that they should not be on the road.
If you think about it, if they sold their (uninsured) car and moved someplace where they could use public transportation, they'd probably be ahead. They'd no longer be paying for registration, fuel or parking, and they'd never get a traffic ticket or risk being cited for not having insurance (an automatic $500 fine where I live - I pay less than $500 for a year's insurance on one of my cars). Sounds like a pretty good deal.
Wouldn't blurring out government buildings, churches and schools simply highlight their locations on the maps?
If he's concerned about building details being shown, you have to wonder why. For example, what good does knowing where the skylights on a school do for a terrorist? Very little.