My brother in law was on this flight with my sister. They're taking off on their oh-my-god-we're-so-sorry- here's-your-round-the-world-tickets trip next week.:)
It's utterly untrue to say that props are more efficient than jets: clearly you do not understand how jet engines operate: they always burn the exact same fuel-air mixture - so that at the correct cruising altitude, a jet uses very little fuel indeed. The vast majority of fuel is burned to achieve the cruising altitude, and next to nothing from then on.
This is why short hops of a jet are typically very expensive: a 400 mile flight costs 90% of the fuel cost of a 4000 mile flight (or thereabouts).
I distinctly remember reading a graph published in Scientific American (Sorry, no reference!) many years ago which showed efficiency of travel by means of calories expended, per kilogram, per kilometre travelled.
It was much as one might expect, except at the extreme top end of efficiency: the most efficient form of movement on the planet is a man on a racing bicycle, but he is only slightly ahead of a fully laden 747 which flies in excess of 5000 miles.
Yes, a scramjet is an utterly useless device for transportation of human civilians. The vast majority of people can't handle the (very) mild forces experienced in a 747 - let alone a plane which will achieve Mach 7.
Imagine it: 2 Gravities by rocket to the edge of the atmosphere. Switch to scramjet such that the plane skips out of the atmosphere, and then engage the scramjets again when the plane gets back into the breathable stuff... 2 minutes of 2G acceleration, followed by 2 minutes of free fall... yeah.... 95% of peeps would be throwing up violently within the first two minutes, and that would be the lucky (sedated!) ones.
So, the only time the toilet on the plane is accessible is on the final glide in to landing. Half the time the toilet is unreachable, and the other half it's out of order.:P
We do things differently on the web. Your suggestion **IS** used by some advertisers, but I suspect it is not too popular.
On the web, all you have to do is create different landing pages for each of your adverts. These are unique, and the stats speak for themselves.
Using decent server side code, it's also possible to distinguish which advertisement your actual purchasers arrived from, and this is quite prevalent amongst serious e-commerce businesses.
If your IT department isn't all that good, you can splurge big time on a very sophisticated WebTrends account, which will do all this stuff, and a lot more besides.
That's a stretch. Given that an orbit is highly dynamic, how can something be "based" on it? A base implies a solid foundation: something "on orbit" most definitely is not.
What on earth is wrong with "orbiting"? (No pun intended)
Jesus, it's like listening to American TV interviews, when people say "at this time", or "at this moment" when what they mean is "now".
But I guess there a lot of people to whom brevity and clarity mean diddly squat. *sigh*
Liquifaction huh?
Yup, that'll ruin your day alright: with the ground behaving like water, with actual cresting waves (a la the ocean!) causing trees to be actually thrown out of the ground, and houses (or what remains of them) to float on the surface like boats.
I live on the Pacific Rim of Fire, in New Zealand, and the ground on which my house sits has a high chance of liquifaction. We ensured the house design includes a special "boat" design in the floor slab which hopefully means the house remains intact while it surfs around the neighbourhood.
Hopefully I've survive also!
There are bacteria which crack hydrogen from common compounds FOR FREE. They shit out Hydrogen. Now, get some good bio-engineers onto these bacteria, and make them into A1-Supar-Hydrogen shitters.
Drop concrete barrels into seabed subduction zones: the nuclear material came from the crust, so it's only natural to send it back into the crust when we have finished with it.
If you were getting REALLY paranoid, simply dropping the barrels into the muck in the subduction zone could be replaced by drilling holes, and dropping the barrels into the holes.
"One of the guys we met was the head "Safety Engineer". He was demostrating how he tested the air for poisionous chemicals, with some disposable syringe-like devices.
Know what happened?
He broke three of them in a row while trying to demonstrate to us how they worked!"
Yes, I took a few math classes. It was in my junior year at high school when calculators were first permitted in our classrooms too. (I seem to recall that my Casio FX-8100 cost around $100 at the time too. That was a fortune in 1981 - lemme tell you.)
Yes, you can punch numbers into a calculator to get an answer - but the answer has no meaning to you unless you understand the underlying mathematical principle. For example, I can ask my 5 year old nephew to tell me what the cube root of 27 is - and I bet you a dollar he can use his calculator to tell me that the answer is "3". However, if I ask him to tell me what a cube root is, he won't have a shit-show.
This because he won't be taught cube roots for another 10 years or so.
The important thing here is the "mathematic principle" part. In my view, it's the principles which are important, not the calculations themselves. To my mind, simply getting people to estimate the result is a much better idea than teaching them actually HOW to colculate the answer: skills at estimation are NEVER lost, whereas, who can remember how to calculate Newtons Forward Difference Interpolations? Using estimations allows you to understand the mathematic principle, and to ensure that your calculated answers are within cooey of your estimation. If they don't match then you have a problem.
This at least would prevent blind faith in calculators. (But then again, why WOULDN'T you have blind faith in a calculator? Do they EVER make a mistake? No! The only problem with calculators is pressing the wrong buttons and missing this fact. Then your estimation ability alerts you to this.
Knowing HOW to calculate something isn't the modern human way any more. Knowing WHAT is being calculated, and its significance is where we are headed. Human brains are useless (or mostly so) at math, and seeing as they aren't designed for math, this isn't surprising. But we are amazingly remarkable at coming up with ideas that math CAN solve. These are the things we should be teaching in school: how to derive questions from facts, measurements or ideas, which in turn allow us to develop mathematical principles (or use existing ones) to solve them.
No, I can't see that banning calculators in school would improve the human condition in any way.
Similarly, the teaching of classical Latin, while attractive at first (I admit), is not a good idea. Unless simply astounding teachers are available, it's simply not possible to get school children to learn a dead language - no matter how "good" it is for them. No - they'd be better off learning Comparative Social Science, History, Geology, Oratory skills, debating skills, critical thinking, skepticism, and a host of other topics which would provide far greater benefit.
It seems Moore's Law is just a convenient way to drive a self-fulfilling manufacturing prophecy, and its meaning is changed to suit the situation.
Ikka Tuomi, quoted:
In 1965, Gordon Moore, Director of Fairchild Semiconductor's Research and Development Laboratories, wrote an article on the future development of semiconductor industry for the 35th anniversary issue of Electronics magazine. In the article, Moore noted that the complexity of minimum cost semiconductor components had doubled per year since the first prototype microchip was produced in 1959. This exponential increase in the number of components on a chip became later known as Moore's Law. In the 1980s, Moore's Law started to be described as the doubling of number of transistors on a chip every 18 months. At the beginning of the 1990s, Moore's Law became commonly interpreted as the doubling of microprocessor power every 18 months. In the 1990s, Moore's Law became widely associated with the claim that computing power at fixed cost is doubling every 18 months.
Ikka's an idiot who doesn't believe in Moore's Law by the way, but apart from that, he's a smart cookie.
Sweet Baby Jebus, I wish I had a dollar for every time some greeny gets upset about a fucking glacier shrinking - or growing! They freak out when they melt, and they turn around and freak out if they're growing!
Look, you can't have it both ways!
I'm far more inclined to believe that glaciers shrink and grow in a rythmn entirely their own, on a time-scale that depends on a million things. Hell, 10 years ago the greens in New Zealand were panicing because Fox Glacier was retreating at some god-forsaken, never before heard of, world altering rate - and now that self same glacier is growing at some god forsaken, never never before heard of and world altering rate! And guess what? They're spinning out!
When the glacier was shrinking, it was "Global Warming Is Dooming Us All". Now it's growing, and hey, it's "Global Warming is Dooming Us All".
I think from this we can take the following information:
1) Glaciers shrink sometimes
2) Glaciers grow sometimes
3) We don't know dick about where, when or why
4) We should shoot all those who profess to know the answer to #3.
5)????
6) Profit
English is a language which not only "borrows" words from other langauges, it will also chase them down dark alleys, hit them over the head, and go through their pockets!
Sadly, what starts out with a good headline turns into a mindless smudge pretty quickly. This guy is a nutcase: he wants calculators banned from classrooms. The calculator, one of the very few GENUINELY helpful and intuitive devices ever created by man. It is one of the VERY FEW things which actually do make humans smarter, and it's possible to use one without an instruction manual - a pre-requisite for any device to qualify as "well designed".
He also states he wants students to study Latin (I did, for 6 years) and minor in English Literature.
These two assertions make him a complete fool - and not worth the pixels he's used.
His concept may be correct, but his ability to deliver his message has itself been ruined due to his inability to remain neutral and objective on the topic. He's also failed to address the central thesis of his article, and this is:
"Failure in language causes an inability to think clearly, to create complex inventions inside the skull, and to communicate effectively with other human beings."
Frankly, the only thing which seperates us from animals is language. Tool use and large brains are not uncommon, only we have created language to extend our brains and knowledge beyond our inherent abilities.
Poor language skills will ALWAYS be fine to exchange pleasantries, stupid repartee, insults, and a wide range of human ideas, but they will NEVER permit the creation or accurate dissemination of complex new ideas.
In other words, it lies at the very heart of human ability.
No, you've missed the point. Failure to get English correct is a failure inside the brain to correctly formulate an idea. Without language, you can't formulate any complex idea in your head. It's that simple.
If you get the language wrong, then the idea can NOT be right.
First computer was an Ohio Scientific Superboard II. The alternate, a fully assembled device was called the "C1P".
8K of RAM, 8K of ROM, and read/wrote to cassette at 1KB per minute.
Eventually expanded it to have 128KB of RAM, with an 8" RX01 floppy drive ripped from an old Digital PDP-11. Modified a 21" B&W TV to be the monitor, and converted a thermal printer from an adding machine into a printer for the thing.
It required 4 power supplies and drew almost 20 amps in total.
Oh, and yeah, we overclocked it from 1MHz to 2MHz. This meant having to install a heatsink on the CPU and 2 fans in the case.
To this day, still the fastest booting computer I've ever owned.
Bring on M-RAM boot times!
Hey - look - if I shoot myself in the head, brains come out the other side!
Roll on the surgically implanted 1024 channel ear. In 2025 most "personal stereo" users will need them.
I despise headphones, in every form, even the StaX Electrostatic Ear Speakers I paid $2200 for. They gather dust in the corner, while the cheap little B&Ws belt out MP3s 12 hours a day - at volumes I can make a phone call while listening to.
No - it is NOT a theory. A defining characteristic of a theory is that it must be falsifiable. ID is NOT falsifiable - so it can not be described as a "theory". It is, best described, perhaps, as a "crackpot theory". Or alternatively, we'd be kind, and say it is "conjecture", "speculation", or "a poor answer to a question which doesn't exist", or any other non-scientific concept.
I'm encouraged to see some sense coming out of a US court on this topic: there's hope for the USA yet!
Be nice if you could learn to spell. The word is "DEFINITELY"!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, as much sense as any ridiculous method you can think of to keep the super-rich on their meeting schedule...
My brother in law was on this flight with my sister. They're taking off on their oh-my-god-we're-so-sorry- here's-your-round-the-world-tickets trip next week. :)
It's utterly untrue to say that props are more efficient than jets: clearly you do not understand how jet engines operate: they always burn the exact same fuel-air mixture - so that at the correct cruising altitude, a jet uses very little fuel indeed. The vast majority of fuel is burned to achieve the cruising altitude, and next to nothing from then on.
This is why short hops of a jet are typically very expensive: a 400 mile flight costs 90% of the fuel cost of a 4000 mile flight (or thereabouts).
I distinctly remember reading a graph published in Scientific American (Sorry, no reference!) many years ago which showed efficiency of travel by means of calories expended, per kilogram, per kilometre travelled.
It was much as one might expect, except at the extreme top end of efficiency: the most efficient form of movement on the planet is a man on a racing bicycle, but he is only slightly ahead of a fully laden 747 which flies in excess of 5000 miles.
Yes, a scramjet is an utterly useless device for transportation of human civilians. The vast majority of people can't handle the (very) mild forces experienced in a 747 - let alone a plane which will achieve Mach 7.
Imagine it: 2 Gravities by rocket to the edge of the atmosphere. Switch to scramjet such that the plane skips out of the atmosphere, and then engage the scramjets again when the plane gets back into the breathable stuff... 2 minutes of 2G acceleration, followed by 2 minutes of free fall... yeah.... 95% of peeps would be throwing up violently within the first two minutes, and that would be the lucky (sedated!) ones.
So, the only time the toilet on the plane is accessible is on the final glide in to landing. Half the time the toilet is unreachable, and the other half it's out of order. :P
Please note: The article does not say that the USA will dominate this research!
On the web, all you have to do is create different landing pages for each of your adverts. These are unique, and the stats speak for themselves.
Using decent server side code, it's also possible to distinguish which advertisement your actual purchasers arrived from, and this is quite prevalent amongst serious e-commerce businesses.
If your IT department isn't all that good, you can splurge big time on a very sophisticated WebTrends account, which will do all this stuff, and a lot more besides.
I, for one, welcome our new over-hyped overlords.
That's a stretch. Given that an orbit is highly dynamic, how can something be "based" on it? A base implies a solid foundation: something "on orbit" most definitely is not.
What on earth is wrong with "orbiting"? (No pun intended)
Jesus, it's like listening to American TV interviews, when people say "at this time", or "at this moment" when what they mean is "now".
But I guess there a lot of people to whom brevity and clarity mean diddly squat. *sigh*
HMMM. The exact opposite of FUD. Who's getting paid here?
Liquifaction huh? Yup, that'll ruin your day alright: with the ground behaving like water, with actual cresting waves (a la the ocean!) causing trees to be actually thrown out of the ground, and houses (or what remains of them) to float on the surface like boats. I live on the Pacific Rim of Fire, in New Zealand, and the ground on which my house sits has a high chance of liquifaction. We ensured the house design includes a special "boat" design in the floor slab which hopefully means the house remains intact while it surfs around the neighbourhood. Hopefully I've survive also!
USD $80,000 is a respectable income. I doubt many people would be embarrassed to have people know they earn $80K PA.
Problem of H2 generation: solved.
Drop concrete barrels into seabed subduction zones: the nuclear material came from the crust, so it's only natural to send it back into the crust when we have finished with it.
If you were getting REALLY paranoid, simply dropping the barrels into the muck in the subduction zone could be replaced by drilling holes, and dropping the barrels into the holes.
Yes, you can punch numbers into a calculator to get an answer - but the answer has no meaning to you unless you understand the underlying mathematical principle. For example, I can ask my 5 year old nephew to tell me what the cube root of 27 is - and I bet you a dollar he can use his calculator to tell me that the answer is "3". However, if I ask him to tell me what a cube root is, he won't have a shit-show.
This because he won't be taught cube roots for another 10 years or so.
The important thing here is the "mathematic principle" part. In my view, it's the principles which are important, not the calculations themselves. To my mind, simply getting people to estimate the result is a much better idea than teaching them actually HOW to colculate the answer: skills at estimation are NEVER lost, whereas, who can remember how to calculate Newtons Forward Difference Interpolations? Using estimations allows you to understand the mathematic principle, and to ensure that your calculated answers are within cooey of your estimation. If they don't match then you have a problem.
This at least would prevent blind faith in calculators. (But then again, why WOULDN'T you have blind faith in a calculator? Do they EVER make a mistake? No! The only problem with calculators is pressing the wrong buttons and missing this fact. Then your estimation ability alerts you to this.
Knowing HOW to calculate something isn't the modern human way any more. Knowing WHAT is being calculated, and its significance is where we are headed. Human brains are useless (or mostly so) at math, and seeing as they aren't designed for math, this isn't surprising. But we are amazingly remarkable at coming up with ideas that math CAN solve. These are the things we should be teaching in school: how to derive questions from facts, measurements or ideas, which in turn allow us to develop mathematical principles (or use existing ones) to solve them.
No, I can't see that banning calculators in school would improve the human condition in any way.
Similarly, the teaching of classical Latin, while attractive at first (I admit), is not a good idea. Unless simply astounding teachers are available, it's simply not possible to get school children to learn a dead language - no matter how "good" it is for them. No - they'd be better off learning Comparative Social Science, History, Geology, Oratory skills, debating skills, critical thinking, skepticism, and a host of other topics which would provide far greater benefit.
Cool! Now I can be CERTAIN of not being recognised in China!
Look, you can't have it both ways!
I'm far more inclined to believe that glaciers shrink and grow in a rythmn entirely their own, on a time-scale that depends on a million things. Hell, 10 years ago the greens in New Zealand were panicing because Fox Glacier was retreating at some god-forsaken, never before heard of, world altering rate - and now that self same glacier is growing at some god forsaken, never never before heard of and world altering rate! And guess what? They're spinning out!
When the glacier was shrinking, it was "Global Warming Is Dooming Us All". Now it's growing, and hey, it's "Global Warming is Dooming Us All".
I think from this we can take the following information:
1) Glaciers shrink sometimes
2) Glaciers grow sometimes
3) We don't know dick about where, when or why
4) We should shoot all those who profess to know the answer to #3.
5)????
6) Profit
English is a language which not only "borrows" words from other langauges, it will also chase them down dark alleys, hit them over the head, and go through their pockets!
He also states he wants students to study Latin (I did, for 6 years) and minor in English Literature.
These two assertions make him a complete fool - and not worth the pixels he's used.
His concept may be correct, but his ability to deliver his message has itself been ruined due to his inability to remain neutral and objective on the topic. He's also failed to address the central thesis of his article, and this is:
"Failure in language causes an inability to think clearly, to create complex inventions inside the skull, and to communicate effectively with other human beings."
Frankly, the only thing which seperates us from animals is language. Tool use and large brains are not uncommon, only we have created language to extend our brains and knowledge beyond our inherent abilities.
Poor language skills will ALWAYS be fine to exchange pleasantries, stupid repartee, insults, and a wide range of human ideas, but they will NEVER permit the creation or accurate dissemination of complex new ideas.
In other words, it lies at the very heart of human ability.
If you get the language wrong, then the idea can NOT be right.
First computer was an Ohio Scientific Superboard II. The alternate, a fully assembled device was called the "C1P". 8K of RAM, 8K of ROM, and read/wrote to cassette at 1KB per minute. Eventually expanded it to have 128KB of RAM, with an 8" RX01 floppy drive ripped from an old Digital PDP-11. Modified a 21" B&W TV to be the monitor, and converted a thermal printer from an adding machine into a printer for the thing. It required 4 power supplies and drew almost 20 amps in total. Oh, and yeah, we overclocked it from 1MHz to 2MHz. This meant having to install a heatsink on the CPU and 2 fans in the case. To this day, still the fastest booting computer I've ever owned. Bring on M-RAM boot times!
Anthropomorphisation With an "s" please, you philistine! ;)
And these facts surprise anyone? OMFG:
Hey - look - if I shoot myself in the head, brains come out the other side!
Roll on the surgically implanted 1024 channel ear. In 2025 most "personal stereo" users will need them.
I despise headphones, in every form, even the StaX Electrostatic Ear Speakers I paid $2200 for. They gather dust in the corner, while the cheap little B&Ws belt out MP3s 12 hours a day - at volumes I can make a phone call while listening to.
No - it is NOT a theory. A defining characteristic of a theory is that it must be falsifiable. ID is NOT falsifiable - so it can not be described as a "theory". It is, best described, perhaps, as a "crackpot theory". Or alternatively, we'd be kind, and say it is "conjecture", "speculation", or "a poor answer to a question which doesn't exist", or any other non-scientific concept.
I'm encouraged to see some sense coming out of a US court on this topic: there's hope for the USA yet!
Be nice if you could learn to spell. The word is "DEFINITELY"!