Sorry -- Those strobe lights are required by FAA rules for aircraft protection. They are supposed to be visible from 10 miles away on a sunny day!
At least you don't have to look at this 200ft tall tower near an airport that was erected in the 1960s or so. It has not only the old red flashers, but it's painted alternating red/white every 50 feet! Ick! (sorry - no street view)
One of the fatalities was Blank Label Comics, which hosts a large collection of web comics and their supporting forums. They get multi-millions of hits daily, so multiple servers for them would be expected.
Ha Ha -- Made you all think! Nyah!
Two adults and two kids in a Prius? 200 + 150 + 90 + 60. Adjust to suit.
And you thought the Grammar Nazis were bad, heh heh...
Range (unrefueled): 6800 Mi (approx numbers, people)
Approx Cruising Speed: 400 mph (they don't fly full out all the time)
Duration: 17 hours
Fuel Load: 167,000 lbs
Fuel Rate: 9,800 lbs/hour
At 6 lb/gal: 1633 gal/hr
At $3/gal: $4900/hour
Which is pretty comparable to commercial 4 engine passenger and cargo jets.
Oh -- that means it carries 20 tons at less than 5 gallons per ton-mile.
A 22 mpg pickup with 3/4 ton load is 29 gal/ton-mile.
A Prius at 45 mpg and an 500 lb load (4 pax) is 11 gal/ton-mile.
1. Attack the plan - Futility
2. Attack the alliances - Division
3. Attack the resources - Frustration
4. Attack the army in the field - Attrition
5. Attack the cities - Destruction
The costs increase with each step, which is why the cities are last. Good, proactive intellegence and operatives can prevent things from happening. If not, they can foul things up so they can't happen. Communications is a resource, so it looks like step 3 is on the table.
Huge amounts of fundamental culture simply disappears because it is so transparent or ordinary to those it affects. The next generation comes along and they forget about it because of that apparent mediocracy. For example, breast feeding was normal, ordinary, and public in America up through the 1950's. Movie and later Television rule-makers didn't allow showing it unless it was part of some National Geographic type presentation. Today, breast feeding is being re-discovered in a storm of controversy because an entire generation has not only forgotten, but confused the topic with beer commercials.
Then again, how many people want to remember Phillippine Midget Snuff films? And why?
The robotic system is also faster because the entire warehouse can adapt, in real time, to changes in demand by having the robots move shelves with popular items closer to the workers (pdf), where the shelves can be quickly retrieved while items that aren't selling are gradually moved farther away.
I wonder how long it takes to defrag the entire warehouse. Heaven help them if it's a bubble sort. B-Tree perhaps? Oh -- and what about lost clusters?
That's it -- I'm simply going to have to not use my PrOn-A-Day screen saver during my month-long Child Labor Personal Services research trip to Thailand. Maybe Penny Arcade instead!
>There is a brown rat, a black rat, and a tan rat.
>The tan rat attacks! It misses you.
Hit rat with club
>Which rat? The brown rat, the black rat, or the tan rat?
Hit tan rat with club
>A hit! The tan rat is at death's door, knocking loudly.
Ah, how well I remember playing and hacking this game on my Apple ][. It's where I got to create my own weapons to go up against the real baddies like a 4d8 HP vampire, for example. I wound up creating the Snarl, the Super Snarl, and finally the Atomic Snarl, a 50d1 magic wand for housecleaning those really pesky dungeons.
"I study self-motion perception, from basic-science vestibular processing to the role of real-motion cues in flight simulation."
Hi kids! I'm a scientist, and I get to help figure out why people don't just fall over. Everybody stand up. Now, stand on one foot! Good -- Your muscles help keep you up, but why don't you fall? That's part of what I work on. OK, sit down, and I need a volunteer...
I study self-motion perception, from basic-science vestibular processing to the role of real-motion cues in flight simulation.
Ok volunteer -- have you ever caught a ball? Well, step back a little bit, and try this (tosses brightly colored sponge). You caught it! Toss it back, go a little further, and I'll try again. (Tosses sponge again) Great! Now -- just how did you know to do that? One time you were close, then you were far away! What happened to make it work? That is part of what I study too!
Who wants to pretend they're a tree? Stand up and hold out your arm! Wave arm with flappy winged bird doll. (Talk about flying birds coming in for a landing and not hitting the branch, or smacking into the tree.) Airplane pilots have to land their planes too, and not hit the ground too hard. I help figure out better ways to make that happen.
Visual stimulation and silly setups lead into simple explanations that kids can understand because they were entertained and their curiosity aroused. If they're giggling, they're able to learn becaue they're paying attention!
Remember how we all stopped using chlorofluorocarbons? And suddenly a 50 to 140 year lifetime pollutant has dissappeared in the 9 years since 1996.
The ice age ended and people moved: OK, that works for a few thousand cavemen. Now do it with a billion. Pity. Venice has been sinking into the sea for 300 years, and now when it rains, thousands of bodies clog the canals.
Warmer == more plant growth == more CO2 vs Plants absorbing CO2. Yep, you got me there -- I stated that very poorly. My Bad. Should have said:
Warmer == more life growth (even in the Sahara until the rains stop) == more CO2.
C02 vs CO2 --- Style note: Always include a trivial typo in potentially emotional arguments so the emo grammarians can take the bait. Nobody complained about "Therer", but it took dozens of posts to catch the Plants-Produce-CO2 mismatch. Be careful the next time you jump on the trivial and miss the fundamental.
The temperature and CO2 traces match! OK, they're similar. That doesn't mean one caused the other. I also don't see any comparisons to other influences, such as Oxygen levels or Solar activity.
The TV Show -- Funny, I didn't see any counter arguments for the political side of things, much less the other climate correlations displayed. I mentioned the show last because it supported my existing claims, not that I make claims based on it.
Oh, is it a good thing that professional politicians can expound on climate without an Atmospheric Science degree but critics are dismissed because -- oh, never mind...
Sorry folks, but as a 30 year weather guy, I have to call B.S.
In the 1970's, the worry was Global Cooling, because global temps were on a down swing, so we're all going to die. Now they're tending upwards, so we're all going to die. Oh, and there was an Ozone Hole, so we're all going to die. You get the idea.
The global temps were much warmer than today from the 1300's to 1500's. Greenland was actually green and you could grow grapes in Scotland. The 1600's saw a cool period -- see Maunder Minimum. Around 14,000 years ago, when Europe, northern Asia and North America were under the ice, Egypt and North Africa were grassy plains. Therer were plenty of rivers through the Saraha, and the Qatar Depression was a lake. The ice age ended and the climate changed. Guess what -- animals and people moved along with it. The melted ice cap meant the oceans rose a few hundred feet, so the coastline changed too. Polar bears still know how to swim.
The Carbon Dioxde and temperature pattern are correlated, but from Statistics 101, day 1, Correlation is NOT causation. BTW -- warmer conditions mean more plant growth, so more C02 is a likely RESULT of a temperature rise, not a percussor. WATER VAPOR is the earth's primary "greenhouse" gas, and many times more significant than C02, because Water Vapor forms CLOUDS.
Without the atmosphere, the earth's blackbody temp would be 255K/-18C/0F. The atmosphere makes the effective temperature 288K/15C/59F, which is why 15C is part of the International Standard Atmosphere.
The point is that warming and cooling are going to come and go because solar cycles come and go. The last 14,000 years or so have been (mostly) warming -- the most recent (of many) ice ages ended. No doubt things will continue to fluctuate, and so what? We'll adapt.
If you were able to watch UK Channel 4's "The Great Global Warming Swindle", it's been pulled from YouTube for copyright issues. Pity. It was spot on.
My bad -- My working number was 14.29 for air... gram atomic weight of O2 = 16 x.21 plus N2 = 14 x.78 plus H20 = 10 x.01 = 14.29
Then I subtracted 2 for the He and found displacement buoyancy: 12.29/14.29 = 86%
So... He will lift about 80% of the air it displaces. Calculations proceded from there. I plugged in the 12.29 into the text instead of the 14.29. That's what I get from quick editing to make the reply before having to do something else!
Oh -- thank you that I didn't have to rehash Avogadro's Law!
Ok... some quick and dirty math here -- sea level conditions assumed on a normal (15C) day:
Air weighs about 1 Kg per cubic yard (no whining about mixed units, please)
O2/N2/H20 21/78/1% mix works out to 12.29 atomic weight vs He weight of 2, so...
He weighs only about 20% of air, so it can lift 80% of the air it displaces.
Given the above:
An equipped company of 100 soldiers is about 100kg/220lbs each -- total: 10 tonnes
This would require a minimum of 125000 cubic yards of He to lift by itself, and much more for the vehicle empty weight, fuel, etc.
For comparison, an LTA 138S Airship is 160 feet/50 meters long, volume of 138,000 ft3 (3,908 m3) (5100 yd3), and lifts only 1.5 tonnes.
Scaling up from the LTA 138S, you'd need 25 times the volume - 3.5 million ft3 minimum. Not impossible, but consider the design for the CargoLifter which would be 850ft/260m long with payload of 160 tonnes for 17.6 million ft3/ 500,000 m3 of Helium.
What ever it would be, navigating a floating object the size of an WW II Jeep Carrier or Cruiser into and out of cornfields would not be simple in any sort of wind.
2.(a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons. [My emphasis]
The Cold War has been termed WW III, so this is now WW IV. Get over it.
Using this in slow-down zones would capture some of the braking energy from the autos, so it would not increase fuel consumption. It would be a sort of speed bump, since the ramp is being compressed/pushed down by the passing cars.
That leaves the ROI for energy costs vs TCO for maintaining something that gets squished perhaps thousands of times daily by 2 to 40 ton vehicles.
The best places for these things would be where regular power is hard to come by, such as to augment solar in cloudy (winter?) conditions. How immune is it to ice buildup under the ramp?
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry -- Those strobe lights are required by FAA rules for aircraft protection. They are supposed to be visible from 10 miles away on a sunny day!
At least you don't have to look at this 200ft tall tower near an airport that was erected in the 1960s or so. It has not only the old red flashers, but it's painted alternating red/white every 50 feet! Ick! (sorry - no street view)
Kewl! I want to go Surfing!
Not only will this let me I better organize my porn links, but I can avoid those Icky Malware sites, too!
Thank you Team Mozilla! The world is a better place because of your hard work.
Now, where'd I put my tube of lube...
One of the fatalities was Blank Label Comics, which hosts a large collection of web comics and their supporting forums. They get multi-millions of hits daily, so multiple servers for them would be expected.
As if my time off wasn't short enough....
Ha Ha -- Made you all think! Nyah! Two adults and two kids in a Prius? 200 + 150 + 90 + 60. Adjust to suit. And you thought the Grammar Nazis were bad, heh heh...
Which is pretty comparable to commercial 4 engine passenger and cargo jets.
Oh -- that means it carries 20 tons at less than 5 gallons per ton-mile.
A 22 mpg pickup with 3/4 ton load is 29 gal/ton-mile.
A Prius at 45 mpg and an 500 lb load (4 pax) is 11 gal/ton-mile.
I don't think they make a Stealth Prius yet.
From Sun Tzu (IIRC):
1. Attack the plan - Futility
2. Attack the alliances - Division
3. Attack the resources - Frustration
4. Attack the army in the field - Attrition
5. Attack the cities - Destruction
The costs increase with each step, which is why the cities are last. Good, proactive intellegence and operatives can prevent things from happening. If not, they can foul things up so they can't happen. Communications is a resource, so it looks like step 3 is on the table.
Like Barbra Cartland? Or Penny Dreadfuls? Or the RFC Archive? Or YouTube?
Huge amounts of fundamental culture simply disappears because it is so transparent or ordinary to those it affects. The next generation comes along and they forget about it because of that apparent mediocracy. For example, breast feeding was normal, ordinary, and public in America up through the 1950's. Movie and later Television rule-makers didn't allow showing it unless it was part of some National Geographic type presentation. Today, breast feeding is being re-discovered in a storm of controversy because an entire generation has not only forgotten, but confused the topic with beer commercials.
Then again, how many people want to remember Phillippine Midget Snuff films? And why?
"Move or I'll Shoot!"
Oh, never mind -- nobody saw Heartbeeps anyway...
I wonder how much of the data collected will be burnt to disks and sent to Britain.
That's it -- I'm simply going to have to not use my PrOn-A-Day screen saver during my month-long Child Labor Personal Services research trip to Thailand. Maybe Penny Arcade instead!
>There is a brown rat, a black rat, and a tan rat.
>The tan rat attacks! It misses you.
Hit rat with club
>Which rat? The brown rat, the black rat, or the tan rat?
Hit tan rat with club
>A hit! The tan rat is at death's door, knocking loudly.
Ah, how well I remember playing and hacking this game on my Apple ][. It's where I got to create my own weapons to go up against the real baddies like a 4d8 HP vampire, for example. I wound up creating the Snarl, the Super Snarl, and finally the Atomic Snarl, a 50d1 magic wand for housecleaning those really pesky dungeons.
And so I remain today: Atomic Snarl!
"I study self-motion perception, from basic-science vestibular processing to the role of real-motion cues in flight simulation."
Hi kids! I'm a scientist, and I get to help figure out why people don't just fall over. Everybody stand up. Now, stand on one foot! Good -- Your muscles help keep you up, but why don't you fall? That's part of what I work on. OK, sit down, and I need a volunteer...
I study self-motion perception, from basic-science vestibular processing to the role of real-motion cues in flight simulation.
Ok volunteer -- have you ever caught a ball? Well, step back a little bit, and try this (tosses brightly colored sponge). You caught it! Toss it back, go a little further, and I'll try again. (Tosses sponge again) Great! Now -- just how did you know to do that? One time you were close, then you were far away! What happened to make it work? That is part of what I study too!
Who wants to pretend they're a tree? Stand up and hold out your arm! Wave arm with flappy winged bird doll. (Talk about flying birds coming in for a landing and not hitting the branch, or smacking into the tree.) Airplane pilots have to land their planes too, and not hit the ground too hard. I help figure out better ways to make that happen.
Visual stimulation and silly setups lead into simple explanations that kids can understand because they were entertained and their curiosity aroused. If they're giggling, they're able to learn becaue they're paying attention!
Yep! Feel the Love of the Glory of all which is Slashdot...
Shoot-the-Messengers: 40% Interesting, 40% Overrated, 10% Troll High Score 3, now down to 1.
"Yes, a small number of cranks were pushing the global cooling story,..." Time Magazine, 24 June 1974
Remember how we all stopped using chlorofluorocarbons? And suddenly a 50 to 140 year lifetime pollutant has dissappeared in the 9 years since 1996.
The ice age ended and people moved: OK, that works for a few thousand cavemen. Now do it with a billion. Pity. Venice has been sinking into the sea for 300 years, and now when it rains, thousands of bodies clog the canals.
Warmer == more plant growth == more CO2 vs Plants absorbing CO2. Yep, you got me there -- I stated that very poorly. My Bad. Should have said:
Warmer == more life growth (even in the Sahara until the rains stop) == more CO2.
C02 vs CO2 --- Style note: Always include a trivial typo in potentially emotional arguments so the emo grammarians can take the bait. Nobody complained about "Therer", but it took dozens of posts to catch the Plants-Produce-CO2 mismatch. Be careful the next time you jump on the trivial and miss the fundamental.
The temperature and CO2 traces match! OK, they're similar. That doesn't mean one caused the other. I also don't see any comparisons to other influences, such as Oxygen levels or Solar activity.
The TV Show -- Funny, I didn't see any counter arguments for the political side of things, much less the other climate correlations displayed. I mentioned the show last because it supported my existing claims, not that I make claims based on it.
Oh, is it a good thing that professional politicians can expound on climate without an Atmospheric Science degree but critics are dismissed because -- oh, never mind...
Sorry folks, but as a 30 year weather guy, I have to call B.S.
In the 1970's, the worry was Global Cooling, because global temps were on a down swing, so we're all going to die. Now they're tending upwards, so we're all going to die. Oh, and there was an Ozone Hole, so we're all going to die. You get the idea.
The global temps were much warmer than today from the 1300's to 1500's. Greenland was actually green and you could grow grapes in Scotland. The 1600's saw a cool period -- see Maunder Minimum. Around 14,000 years ago, when Europe, northern Asia and North America were under the ice, Egypt and North Africa were grassy plains. Therer were plenty of rivers through the Saraha, and the Qatar Depression was a lake. The ice age ended and the climate changed. Guess what -- animals and people moved along with it. The melted ice cap meant the oceans rose a few hundred feet, so the coastline changed too. Polar bears still know how to swim.
The Carbon Dioxde and temperature pattern are correlated, but from Statistics 101, day 1, Correlation is NOT causation. BTW -- warmer conditions mean more plant growth, so more C02 is a likely RESULT of a temperature rise, not a percussor. WATER VAPOR is the earth's primary "greenhouse" gas, and many times more significant than C02, because Water Vapor forms CLOUDS.
Without the atmosphere, the earth's blackbody temp would be 255K/-18C/0F. The atmosphere makes the effective temperature 288K/15C/59F, which is why 15C is part of the International Standard Atmosphere.
The point is that warming and cooling are going to come and go because solar cycles come and go. The last 14,000 years or so have been (mostly) warming -- the most recent (of many) ice ages ended. No doubt things will continue to fluctuate, and so what? We'll adapt.
If you were able to watch UK Channel 4's "The Great Global Warming Swindle", it's been pulled from YouTube for copyright issues. Pity. It was spot on.
I'm sure that MySQL and PHP can handle it...
But now you can build your Beowulf Cluster of these and fit it all into one rack!
But do you remember:
And of course -- 3D0G!
My bad -- My working number was 14.29 for air... gram atomic weight of O2 = 16 x .21 plus N2 = 14 x .78 plus H20 = 10 x .01 = 14.29
Then I subtracted 2 for the He and found displacement buoyancy: 12.29/14.29 = 86%
So... He will lift about 80% of the air it displaces. Calculations proceded from there. I plugged in the 12.29 into the text instead of the 14.29. That's what I get from quick editing to make the reply before having to do something else!
Oh -- thank you that I didn't have to rehash Avogadro's Law!
Ok... some quick and dirty math here -- sea level conditions assumed on a normal (15C) day:
Air weighs about 1 Kg per cubic yard (no whining about mixed units, please)
O2/N2/H20 21/78/1% mix works out to 12.29 atomic weight vs He weight of 2, so...
He weighs only about 20% of air, so it can lift 80% of the air it displaces.
Given the above:
An equipped company of 100 soldiers is about 100kg/220lbs each -- total: 10 tonnes
This would require a minimum of 125000 cubic yards of He to lift by itself, and much more for the vehicle empty weight, fuel, etc.
For comparison, an LTA 138S Airship is 160 feet/50 meters long, volume of 138,000 ft3 (3,908 m3) (5100 yd3), and lifts only 1.5 tonnes.
Scaling up from the LTA 138S, you'd need 25 times the volume - 3.5 million ft3 minimum. Not impossible, but consider the design for the CargoLifter which would be 850ft/260m long with payload of 160 tonnes for 17.6 million ft3/ 500,000 m3 of Helium.
What ever it would be, navigating a floating object the size of an WW II Jeep Carrier or Cruiser into and out of cornfields would not be simple in any sort of wind.
The 9/11 commission noted longstanding support by Saddam for AlQaeda.
Yes, America is At War, as declared by Congress:
The Cold War has been termed WW III, so this is now WW IV. Get over it.
Using this in slow-down zones would capture some of the braking energy from the autos, so it would not increase fuel consumption. It would be a sort of speed bump, since the ramp is being compressed/pushed down by the passing cars.
That leaves the ROI for energy costs vs TCO for maintaining something that gets squished perhaps thousands of times daily by 2 to 40 ton vehicles.
The best places for these things would be where regular power is hard to come by, such as to augment solar in cloudy (winter?) conditions. How immune is it to ice buildup under the ramp?