I remember reading in a super-cavtation article about underwater engines like that - basically "underwater jet-engines" - I mean, of course it's not quite true, it operates on different principles, but the functionality is pretty similar.
btw, super cavtation is where you make the nose of your _insert_vessel_here_ blunt but it goes so fast that the vapor pressure drops until the vessel (usually a torpedo / bullet / whatever) would be in an airbubble (technically steam bubble! - though there are dissolved air that boils into the bubble too) that it creates itself (and maintains) and hence has no liquid drag for the rest of the vessel (as in, besides the blunt nose).
The engine I read about was actually reacting seawater directly with aluminum shavings and expelling hot steam (or something like that). I am pretty sure there were something else but I can't remember what it was (I don't think it was iron-rust, though, for all of you thinking of thermite). Anyway - neat stuff; should change underwater combat a whole lot.
should get myself one of those to go war(ship) driving;-)
could you elaborate? I can't find anything online for the life of me. what happens to the skin? whe muscles? how do you know that his muscle / skin damage was caused by electroshock toners? what damages are expected? (thanks in advance)
Not trolling, but this point in the game it might really take a country that doesn't give a shit about US bs-laws, and who is a huge market, to avert this kind of crap.
I know the knee-jerking is that "oh it's a terrible regime" and "human rights" and "think of the children" and so forth, but really though - China didn't think so much of DVDs, so they went ahead and defined SVCDs - not as nice and versatile, but pretty good standard, useful.
I mean with all the trade agreements in place, US can pretty much enforce DMCA on everybody through trade embargos and get away with it... No hope for these guys standing up to the US in these areas.
I don't think that's quite true. BJT was good for a while but then when they can finally make FETs in quantity and quality most people switched to it.
The thing is that FETs have a much higher gain than a BJT, and a higher input impedance, lower (or, easier to control manufacture-wise) output impedance, lower leakage (input current) and the gain is not based on a hard-to-calibrate factor (read: BJT's lovely beta number).
At the same time FETS amplification factor is so high, though, that you need to put a lot of feedback on the amplifier to make sure it stays in the linear range. not a hard thing to do. And FETs handle more power too usually, IIRC.
again, havn't touched this stuff for a while, so definitely not authoritative. might be utter bs, in fact, so somebody feel free to correct me.
Is that kind of like "Hire a Hermit?"
on
Adopt a KDE Geek
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· Score: 2, Funny
I mean... pretty much the same, partly - live a secluded life, usually very eccentric, scare away "normal people."
But Hermits can't hack out bulletproof code... hmm...
FYI: back in the old-old days, Castle owners found it "fashionable*" to gave a hermit or two living on their property to... do whatever hermits do. There ARE professional hermits.
* I can't think of another word - I mean, besides peer pressure, why else would you get a hermit? At least your geek would write you some CS homework code for some pizza (I would assume)
first of all, IANA (I am not ancient) so my knowledge on this might be rusty. correct me if anybody knows better.
Now, here are some reasons why tubes might sound better:
first of all let's start with some tube basics: you heat a plate (cathod) and electrons jump off it. the electrons pass through a grid, and gets obsorbed at another plate (anode). You can vary the voltage on the grid and control how much eletrons pass - hence the amplifying.
The difference between a tube amp and a FET amp is that tube amps have some insane amount of dynamic range that is very nice and linear. somethinge like 40V (or more, depending on the tube). It goes by the name "high voltage, low current."
Now, for the same power, FETS can't touch this range because most fets don't operate at that high voltage level - and if you push it then it will saturate / turn off and you won't be linear anymore.
So for the same power, FETS would go toward "low voltage, high current." This is cool and all, and theoretically if you stay within the linear region you are all good, right? wrong. All the EE books teaches you one thing that you never do in the real life - that is to assome a nice ground.
ground is never nice - especially when there is a lot of current, ground tend to float here and there - which would give you crap and distortions that we all know and love. Of course, throughout the years engineers (hey we don't have a life, after all) figured some ways around it - but AFAIK all of these are either 1) very expensive, and 2) not completely effective (usually it's both). (btw, one of these is to make as much of the system digital as possible.)
So... In the end, tube amps still reign. I heard that RCA made the best tubes, no confirmation on this, though.
Just for the few who thought "well when we get lots of superconductors then finally FET amps will be better!" That's not correct either. Unfortunately superconductors we know of are only good for no resistance at DC, and the ground does not play nice because of AC concerns.
So, there you have it. For the record I don't know any engineers who thought "oh yeah I can duplicate a tube response through other means," but they might have told their bosses shit like "I can make it damn close and you can't tell the difference" (which is usually a lie) so to keep their jobs.
And Tubes are considered solid-state. A tad fragile (there are stainless steel ones for the military, if anyone is interested), but still solid state last I checked...
I've tried them. I dont want them. In 5 years maybe when they actually start reaching the quality of CRT's today.
I am sure to some people some thing about one product is more desirable than the other. I have personally never noticed any color-change due to viewing angle on high-end screens, but it might just be my eyes. You are right about the color depth - but for *me* who doesn't exactly do photoediting for a living, don't put high on a priority list.
there are monitors that comes with a hard-coating (glass?) to prevent the sharp-object etc, though. However I'd say that's a child-education issue than a fault-of-the-monitor issue. You child certainly might consider crayoning the wall / carpet / cat very entertaining as well, but hey, you teach them to stop, right?
1) ever heard of stuff like "price range"? when you see cars on-sale, it's not the deal of "I have to match a Neon to a Cavelier dollar to dollar" otherwise you'd only choose the other one. 2) ever heard of ADVANTAGES to LCD? like, lighter? take less space? less emmissions? less power consumption? less distortions? 3) There are people out there who would pay the 250 difference (come on who the hell are you kidding, it's just 10% - it's like buying a beemer and bickering over a 500 dollar leather seat - people will pay for it when they make investments like that). And to be frank, I think all the advantages overweigh the price difference, the lower resolution (seriously now, if 1920x1200 is not enough for you, you've got to learn to organize the desktop - or learn to use virtual desktops), and then some.
just because you are obtusely stuck to an old technology doesn't mean that everybody else can't like something that's "better" for them.
I mean you can barely even see stuff on those Dell laptops with 15" 1600x1200 screens, for crying out loud!
erm I can see just fine and I am lovin' it. Will never go back to a crappy XGA screen.
worse yet, even the 14.1 inch Dells can be ordered with UXGA screens (girlfriend got one). scary, eh?
at the same time, while almost all the nice hi-res laptop screens come from Japan, in Japan you will find virtually no laptops that has above XGA. very rarely they would have some that's extended XGA (wide-screen XGA) at some 1280x768 or somesuch, still pathetic compared to the Dells.
besides the very high cost, that's really one of the main reasons I am sticking with Dells instead of going for a Titanium powerbook (sorry but the 17" aluminum is too big and too ugly) - I mean' after using an UXGA you just can't go back. really.
Earthlink used Zyxel 645 too, all their passwords are changed (tried to get in, can't).
besides, who in their right mind (general populance, now) would go into their modem? to do what? if they had to, do you think they would sell at all? (in this "plug and play is good" world)
of course - Zyxels 645 are actually pretty nice if you do get inside and flash a "proper" bios - you can set it up as a rounter directly, saving you some bux on that D-Link; but no web-configure, though.
I have no idea what is MCA - but I know you are wrong about RDRAM...
I elaborated on this (more from a technological standpoint) before but I can't find that comment.
basically it goes like this, though: Memory market is very, very low-margin (the few number of memory makers is a sure indication of that, if you want evidence), so paying rambus a 2% royalty is rediculous and memory makers are stupid if they didn't try to save this 2% (which, btw, I believe is a GROSS percentage, which, if you work on a 5% profit margin, you are giving 40% of your profits to RAMBUS).
so everybody basically went with / pushed for DDR (Micron started it all, but it was inevitable anyway) - Intel waited a while, but was probably the last one out there, and that was more or less due to contractual obligations.
besides as a technology while RDRAM had its benefits (not gonna go into it) had shortfalls of its own (especially in the manufacturing / design side) - so it wasn't quite worth the 2% royalty anyway.
And then there is the price difference: even if there were zero geeks in a company, the purchasing dude would say "wait, so i can get a RDRAM system for 1500 or an SDRAM system for 1000?" guess which one he/she chooses?
I romantically hope that geeks have a wide cultural impact too, but on some levels it's really diaspointing!
Can I print an organ that is disproportional (no I am not thinking about penises) to what normally comes out?
like, say, would I be able to print a sphere of kidney cells? how about a longer stretch of arm-muscles? attached to a printed, longer leg-bone? can I print a new layer of skin, or new hair folicles? (can you imagine rogain all up on this stuff?) how about a third leg? in fact, how about a beak? a gill so I can swim underwater? (i mean, as long as the blood circulates through it)
the possibilities are endless, marvellous, and scary.
On the other hand, maybe if the demand wanes then they will just not produce so many?
But that's really stupid to be talking about it anyway - because there are 8.2 million Xboxes out there. I don't care how big you think the potential X-box mod-to-run-linux-only crowd is, you have to admit that percentage wise it is statistically neglegable and would have absolutely no impact on microsoft financially whatsoever.
Microsoft can just hire one less Booth-babe in the next trade-show to make back all the money that they ever lost to the "buy box but not games" crowd. Don't dwell on this too much.
There is absolutely no reason for this when you have fuel-cell.
Notice they only talk about "Carbon dioxide emissions are nearly zero" - but that's not the whole story...
There are three major components to car emissions: Hydrocarbons, CO2, and NoX (CO should not be emitted at all)
Hydrogen, last i checked, burns hotter than gasoline; remember now that they are not carrying an onboard oxygen tank, so there are other crap that gets sucked into the combustion chamber - this includes the Oxygen that we need, a little bit of CO2, and a whole mass loads of Nitrogen.
the higher the combustion temperature, the more likely the nitrigen will become NoX (oxides nitrogen, IIRC - including NO2 NO3 etc, hence the X).
NOX is a major contributor to acid rain and the like - however since there are no more hydrocarbon emmissions (or, very little - CO2 needs a whole lot of energy to break apart) - the catalyc converter can't do jack about the NOX; so instead of worrying about global warming, we will simply have something else to worry over.
Two ways out of this: 1) use fuel cell - painstaking and difficult, but probably the most environmentally friendly. besides if you get it right electric motors have more torque anyhow - and real drivers know that torque = acceleration, horspower doesn't 2) carry some liquid oxygen onboard (yeah right) - infrastructure won't support it unless something serious changed - but would be very cool... I will see amature rocketry explode because you can get liquid O2 and H2 at refuelling stations now! =)
still better (CO2 side) than using reformers, but damn... not there yet. gotta wonder though - if they already went with a hydrogen tank, might as well just go with a fuel cell - that was probably the biggest prob w/ fuel cell in the first place
Let's see... Bloomberg (mayor of NYC now) gets a yearly $.01 salary - but I will bet you a dollar to a donut that he makes it all back and more with the rules / regulations / whatever he gets to do while in office. All his friends would benefit from a city office that looks after their assets, and he would likewise be heftily compensated for his efforts.
On the other hand, I guess if Jobs was mad president, Microsoft would be royally fucked. Really, really fucked...
1) when is "end of year"? as in fiscal year (coming up SOON) or end of 2003 (oh-so-long)? 2) where is she GOING? I know everybody is scared about who's coming in, but hell, what if she gets elected senator or something? or wose-yet appointed head some government agency about this-or-that?
comments:
In business world resigning is sometimes used as an "I quit" or "I give up," but often is "I am moving onto greener pastures." If a CEO sees that there is no way he can bring the company out of deep shits, resignation is frequent - as he can shift the blame onto the successor. (I am hoping this is the case and the next guy / gal is a little more mellow) On the other hand, I am very in fear if it's because there is an opening in the Federal Anti-Piracy Beurau or somesuch (yes i know "piracy" is a misnomer - it's "copyright infringement" - but you bet your ass that's what they will name it).
That is a very "american" viewpoint: we've got our shit so fuck you if you can't deal with it. Same happens to the metric system, languages, and forign policies, etc - way too many / much to mention.
I don't believe you realize, or realize the extent of which slashdot is visited by people who are not only capable in english, but also fluent in other languages. Allowing expression otherwise impossible in a ISO-8859-1 environment would only enrich slashdot and the pool of knowledge.
For example, it is not possibe to accurately translate the actual title of "Spirited Away" into other languages because the phrase of exact meaning and context simply does not exist outside of japanese (an exception MAY be chinese). However, if I wanted to post the said title in Japanese to show you which part was translated and which part fudged, I would not be able to.
Just to give an idea of the fudging: In Korean the title became roughly "Chihiro is 'missing in action'"; in French it is "Chihiro's trip/travel"; etc.
Furthermore, you would be surprised how easy it is to handle unicode in slashdot: it's about three-fold:
1) declare default encoding in UTF-8 2) set flag in Perl to handle unicode (Perl has had support for a while now) 3) to ensure older comments come out, write a converter to change everything over. (this is actually easier than you think it is, because you can use Moz character set detection code on individual comments out of the database) DONE!
So I don't think there really is a logically sound excuse to not support internationalization on slashdot, hence my reasoning comes two ways: 1) they give the same "american attidude" mentioned above, 2) they (hopefully) are working on it.
I am sorry but this is simply not true. Microwave frequency (in an oven, I assume) is NOT the resonate frequency of water. It's actually chosen because it's part of the ISM (industrial scientific medical) band. Try microwaving some water with a 2GHz wave. Try again with a 3GHz wave. water heats up too! (one easy way of disproving the "resonate frequency" stuff).
The reason that microwave heats water more than others is due to the polarity of the water molecule, so it turns more easily when excited by the periodic wave. If indeed was microwave resonate to water molecule, then you would expect it to affect ice and water with similar effects, however this, again, is not true as Microwave (ovens) does little to ice - the reason you can defrost with it, though, is that the microwave works on the thin layers of water that's melted on the surface, and use it to propogate the heat down to the center.
But not just the English version has grown impressively: More than 37,000 articles are now being worked on in the non-English editions of Wikipedia.
I don't know - I am not completely certain that slashdot editors actually care about this: I mean, action speaks louder than words.
while posting unicode / asian characters in comments used to be possible, now it is not
Slashdot *still* does not declare a default character set (UTF-8 would be nice)
lameness-filter has bugs when it comes to international characters (especially "non-breaking" ones like chinese, korean, and japanese), but it was decided "not going to fix"
Now, I have to admit, maybe they are making progress on it and it's just not public yet... but disabling asian character posting (i was encoding in UTF-8, btw) in comments seem like a backward thing if it was going the "internationalizing" direction.
I sincerely hope that slashdot will be completely UTF-8 someday (it's not that hard, really)... Here's to hoping...
Buyers also must attend a multi-hour training course before the scooter is shipped to them...
I thought one of the main thing about Segway is that it was supposed to be sooooo intuitive like walking? what's up with the multi-hour training?
besides that - does multi-hour mean 2 hours? or 5 hours? Worse yet - Non of the "mandated this many hours courses" I have ever attended lasted for the specific number of hourse.
Take, for example, in NY before you get a license you need a 5 hour (or somesuch) course. Not that I am complaining (that much) but the course ended after about three at a "DMV approved course center." - I say this because if the Segway was not as intuitive as they gloat, and a lenghty safty course was really necessary, then I'd fear of walking from now on - While bad drivers for the most part run into other cars, bad segway charioteers will mostly run into pedestrians.
Slashdot Mirror
ahh; sorry to be a dork, but this is the article on Scientific American about this stuff. Very good read.
I remember reading in a super-cavtation article about underwater engines like that - basically "underwater jet-engines" - I mean, of course it's not quite true, it operates on different principles, but the functionality is pretty similar.
;-)
btw, super cavtation is where you make the nose of your _insert_vessel_here_ blunt but it goes so fast that the vapor pressure drops until the vessel (usually a torpedo / bullet / whatever) would be in an airbubble (technically steam bubble! - though there are dissolved air that boils into the bubble too) that it creates itself (and maintains) and hence has no liquid drag for the rest of the vessel (as in, besides the blunt nose).
The engine I read about was actually reacting seawater directly with aluminum shavings and expelling hot steam (or something like that). I am pretty sure there were something else but I can't remember what it was (I don't think it was iron-rust, though, for all of you thinking of thermite). Anyway - neat stuff; should change underwater combat a whole lot.
should get myself one of those to go war(ship) driving
could you elaborate? I can't find anything online for the life of me. what happens to the skin? whe muscles? how do you know that his muscle / skin damage was caused by electroshock toners? what damages are expected? (thanks in advance)
How about if I hook myself up to one of those zap-me-and-get-me-in-shape things (you know the stomache excercizers and the muscle toners)
won't do jack for strength, but it sure will look nice, and should keep the blook flowing through the muscles.
btw - I hear that those things do bad to your skin, does anyone know the straightdope on that aspect?
and before anybody start, yes browsing porn will probably another method, but only good for (one of) your forearms.
Not trolling, but this point in the game it might really take a country that doesn't give a shit about US bs-laws, and who is a huge market, to avert this kind of crap.
I know the knee-jerking is that "oh it's a terrible regime" and "human rights" and "think of the children" and so forth, but really though - China didn't think so much of DVDs, so they went ahead and defined SVCDs - not as nice and versatile, but pretty good standard, useful.
I mean with all the trade agreements in place, US can pretty much enforce DMCA on everybody through trade embargos and get away with it... No hope for these guys standing up to the US in these areas.
I don't think that's quite true. BJT was good for a while but then when they can finally make FETs in quantity and quality most people switched to it.
The thing is that FETs have a much higher gain than a BJT, and a higher input impedance, lower (or, easier to control manufacture-wise) output impedance, lower leakage (input current) and the gain is not based on a hard-to-calibrate factor (read: BJT's lovely beta number).
At the same time FETS amplification factor is so high, though, that you need to put a lot of feedback on the amplifier to make sure it stays in the linear range. not a hard thing to do. And FETs handle more power too usually, IIRC.
again, havn't touched this stuff for a while, so definitely not authoritative. might be utter bs, in fact, so somebody feel free to correct me.
I mean... pretty much the same, partly - live a secluded life, usually very eccentric, scare away "normal people."
But Hermits can't hack out bulletproof code... hmm...
FYI: back in the old-old days, Castle owners found it "fashionable*" to gave a hermit or two living on their property to... do whatever hermits do. There ARE professional hermits.
* I can't think of another word - I mean, besides peer pressure, why else would you get a hermit? At least your geek would write you some CS homework code for some pizza (I would assume)
first of all, IANA (I am not ancient) so my knowledge on this might be rusty. correct me if anybody knows better.
Now, here are some reasons why tubes might sound better:
first of all let's start with some tube basics: you heat a plate (cathod) and electrons jump off it. the electrons pass through a grid, and gets obsorbed at another plate (anode). You can vary the voltage on the grid and control how much eletrons pass - hence the amplifying.
The difference between a tube amp and a FET amp is that tube amps have some insane amount of dynamic range that is very nice and linear. somethinge like 40V (or more, depending on the tube). It goes by the name "high voltage, low current."
Now, for the same power, FETS can't touch this range because most fets don't operate at that high voltage level - and if you push it then it will saturate / turn off and you won't be linear anymore.
So for the same power, FETS would go toward "low voltage, high current." This is cool and all, and theoretically if you stay within the linear region you are all good, right? wrong. All the EE books teaches you one thing that you never do in the real life - that is to assome a nice ground.
ground is never nice - especially when there is a lot of current, ground tend to float here and there - which would give you crap and distortions that we all know and love. Of course, throughout the years engineers (hey we don't have a life, after all) figured some ways around it - but AFAIK all of these are either 1) very expensive, and 2) not completely effective (usually it's both). (btw, one of these is to make as much of the system digital as possible.)
So... In the end, tube amps still reign. I heard that RCA made the best tubes, no confirmation on this, though.
Just for the few who thought "well when we get lots of superconductors then finally FET amps will be better!" That's not correct either. Unfortunately superconductors we know of are only good for no resistance at DC, and the ground does not play nice because of AC concerns.
So, there you have it. For the record I don't know any engineers who thought "oh yeah I can duplicate a tube response through other means," but they might have told their bosses shit like "I can make it damn close and you can't tell the difference" (which is usually a lie) so to keep their jobs.
And Tubes are considered solid-state. A tad fragile (there are stainless steel ones for the military, if anyone is interested), but still solid state last I checked...
I am sure to some people some thing about one product is more desirable than the other. I have personally never noticed any color-change due to viewing angle on high-end screens, but it might just be my eyes. You are right about the color depth - but for *me* who doesn't exactly do photoediting for a living, don't put high on a priority list.
there are monitors that comes with a hard-coating (glass?) to prevent the sharp-object etc, though. However I'd say that's a child-education issue than a fault-of-the-monitor issue. You child certainly might consider crayoning the wall / carpet / cat very entertaining as well, but hey, you teach them to stop, right?
alright that's so bullshit where should i begin?
1) ever heard of stuff like "price range"? when you see cars on-sale, it's not the deal of "I have to match a Neon to a Cavelier dollar to dollar" otherwise you'd only choose the other one.
2) ever heard of ADVANTAGES to LCD? like, lighter? take less space? less emmissions? less power consumption? less distortions?
3) There are people out there who would pay the 250 difference (come on who the hell are you kidding, it's just 10% - it's like buying a beemer and bickering over a 500 dollar leather seat - people will pay for it when they make investments like that). And to be frank, I think all the advantages overweigh the price difference, the lower resolution (seriously now, if 1920x1200 is not enough for you, you've got to learn to organize the desktop - or learn to use virtual desktops), and then some.
just because you are obtusely stuck to an old technology doesn't mean that everybody else can't like something that's "better" for them.
get a life instead of flaming.
they have a trial course that you can try if you got a graphics pad.
I got the link when I was browsing around studio Ghibli
if the Link dies, it's the Samsung 240T, 24" LCD with 1920x1200 resolution, for about 2500 dollars last I checked.
erm I can see just fine and I am lovin' it. Will never go back to a crappy XGA screen.
worse yet, even the 14.1 inch Dells can be ordered with UXGA screens (girlfriend got one). scary, eh?
at the same time, while almost all the nice hi-res laptop screens come from Japan, in Japan you will find virtually no laptops that has above XGA. very rarely they would have some that's extended XGA (wide-screen XGA) at some 1280x768 or somesuch, still pathetic compared to the Dells.
besides the very high cost, that's really one of the main reasons I am sticking with Dells instead of going for a Titanium powerbook (sorry but the 17" aluminum is too big and too ugly) - I mean' after using an UXGA you just can't go back. really.
oh that is so bullshit
Earthlink used Zyxel 645 too, all their passwords are changed (tried to get in, can't).
besides, who in their right mind (general populance, now) would go into their modem? to do what? if they had to, do you think they would sell at all? (in this "plug and play is good" world)
of course - Zyxels 645 are actually pretty nice if you do get inside and flash a "proper" bios - you can set it up as a rounter directly, saving you some bux on that D-Link; but no web-configure, though.
I have no idea what is MCA - but I know you are wrong about RDRAM...
I elaborated on this (more from a technological standpoint) before but I can't find that comment.
basically it goes like this, though: Memory market is very, very low-margin (the few number of memory makers is a sure indication of that, if you want evidence), so paying rambus a 2% royalty is rediculous and memory makers are stupid if they didn't try to save this 2% (which, btw, I believe is a GROSS percentage, which, if you work on a 5% profit margin, you are giving 40% of your profits to RAMBUS).
so everybody basically went with / pushed for DDR (Micron started it all, but it was inevitable anyway) - Intel waited a while, but was probably the last one out there, and that was more or less due to contractual obligations.
besides as a technology while RDRAM had its benefits (not gonna go into it) had shortfalls of its own (especially in the manufacturing / design side) - so it wasn't quite worth the 2% royalty anyway.
And then there is the price difference: even if there were zero geeks in a company, the purchasing dude would say "wait, so i can get a RDRAM system for 1500 or an SDRAM system for 1000?" guess which one he/she chooses?
I romantically hope that geeks have a wide cultural impact too, but on some levels it's really diaspointing!
Can I print an organ that is disproportional (no I am not thinking about penises) to what normally comes out?
like, say, would I be able to print a sphere of kidney cells?
how about a longer stretch of arm-muscles?
attached to a printed, longer leg-bone?
can I print a new layer of skin, or new hair folicles? (can you imagine rogain all up on this stuff?)
how about a third leg?
in fact, how about a beak?
a gill so I can swim underwater? (i mean, as long as the blood circulates through it)
the possibilities are endless, marvellous, and scary.
On the other hand, maybe if the demand wanes then they will just not produce so many?
But that's really stupid to be talking about it anyway - because there are 8.2 million Xboxes out there. I don't care how big you think the potential X-box mod-to-run-linux-only crowd is, you have to admit that percentage wise it is statistically neglegable and would have absolutely no impact on microsoft financially whatsoever.
Microsoft can just hire one less Booth-babe in the next trade-show to make back all the money that they ever lost to the "buy box but not games" crowd. Don't dwell on this too much.
There is absolutely no reason for this when you have fuel-cell.
Notice they only talk about "Carbon dioxide emissions are nearly zero" - but that's not the whole story...
There are three major components to car emissions: Hydrocarbons, CO2, and NoX (CO should not be emitted at all)
Hydrogen, last i checked, burns hotter than gasoline; remember now that they are not carrying an onboard oxygen tank, so there are other crap that gets sucked into the combustion chamber - this includes the Oxygen that we need, a little bit of CO2, and a whole mass loads of Nitrogen.
the higher the combustion temperature, the more likely the nitrigen will become NoX (oxides nitrogen, IIRC - including NO2 NO3 etc, hence the X).
NOX is a major contributor to acid rain and the like - however since there are no more hydrocarbon emmissions (or, very little - CO2 needs a whole lot of energy to break apart) - the catalyc converter can't do jack about the NOX; so instead of worrying about global warming, we will simply have something else to worry over.
Two ways out of this:
1) use fuel cell - painstaking and difficult, but probably the most environmentally friendly. besides if you get it right electric motors have more torque anyhow - and real drivers know that torque = acceleration, horspower doesn't
2) carry some liquid oxygen onboard (yeah right) - infrastructure won't support it unless something serious changed - but would be very cool... I will see amature rocketry explode because you can get liquid O2 and H2 at refuelling stations now! =)
still better (CO2 side) than using reformers, but damn... not there yet. gotta wonder though - if they already went with a hydrogen tank, might as well just go with a fuel cell - that was probably the biggest prob w/ fuel cell in the first place
Let's see... Bloomberg (mayor of NYC now) gets a yearly $.01 salary - but I will bet you a dollar to a donut that he makes it all back and more with the rules / regulations / whatever he gets to do while in office. All his friends would benefit from a city office that looks after their assets, and he would likewise be heftily compensated for his efforts.
On the other hand, I guess if Jobs was mad president, Microsoft would be royally fucked. Really, really fucked...
questions:
1) when is "end of year"? as in fiscal year (coming up SOON) or end of 2003 (oh-so-long)?
2) where is she GOING? I know everybody is scared about who's coming in, but hell, what if she gets elected senator or something? or wose-yet appointed head some government agency about this-or-that?
comments:
In business world resigning is sometimes used as an "I quit" or "I give up," but often is "I am moving onto greener pastures." If a CEO sees that there is no way he can bring the company out of deep shits, resignation is frequent - as he can shift the blame onto the successor. (I am hoping this is the case and the next guy / gal is a little more mellow) On the other hand, I am very in fear if it's because there is an opening in the Federal Anti-Piracy Beurau or somesuch (yes i know "piracy" is a misnomer - it's "copyright infringement" - but you bet your ass that's what they will name it).
That is a very "american" viewpoint: we've got our shit so fuck you if you can't deal with it. Same happens to the metric system, languages, and forign policies, etc - way too many / much to mention.
I don't believe you realize, or realize the extent of which slashdot is visited by people who are not only capable in english, but also fluent in other languages. Allowing expression otherwise impossible in a ISO-8859-1 environment would only enrich slashdot and the pool of knowledge.
For example, it is not possibe to accurately translate the actual title of "Spirited Away" into other languages because the phrase of exact meaning and context simply does not exist outside of japanese (an exception MAY be chinese). However, if I wanted to post the said title in Japanese to show you which part was translated and which part fudged, I would not be able to.
Just to give an idea of the fudging:
In Korean the title became roughly "Chihiro is 'missing in action'"; in French it is "Chihiro's trip/travel"; etc.
Furthermore, you would be surprised how easy it is to handle unicode in slashdot: it's about three-fold:
1) declare default encoding in UTF-8
2) set flag in Perl to handle unicode (Perl has had support for a while now)
3) to ensure older comments come out, write a converter to change everything over. (this is actually easier than you think it is, because you can use Moz character set detection code on individual comments out of the database)
DONE!
So I don't think there really is a logically sound excuse to not support internationalization on slashdot, hence my reasoning comes two ways:
1) they give the same "american attidude" mentioned above,
2) they (hopefully) are working on it.
At least know the painful truth.
I am sorry but this is simply not true. Microwave frequency (in an oven, I assume) is NOT the resonate frequency of water. It's actually chosen because it's part of the ISM (industrial scientific medical) band. Try microwaving some water with a 2GHz wave. Try again with a 3GHz wave. water heats up too! (one easy way of disproving the "resonate frequency" stuff).
The reason that microwave heats water more than others is due to the polarity of the water molecule, so it turns more easily when excited by the periodic wave. If indeed was microwave resonate to water molecule, then you would expect it to affect ice and water with similar effects, however this, again, is not true as Microwave (ovens) does little to ice - the reason you can defrost with it, though, is that the microwave works on the thin layers of water that's melted on the surface, and use it to propogate the heat down to the center.
I don't know - I am not completely certain that slashdot editors actually care about this: I mean, action speaks louder than words.
Now, I have to admit, maybe they are making progress on it and it's just not public yet... but disabling asian character posting (i was encoding in UTF-8, btw) in comments seem like a backward thing if it was going the "internationalizing" direction.
I sincerely hope that slashdot will be completely UTF-8 someday (it's not that hard, really)... Here's to hoping...
I thought one of the main thing about Segway is that it was supposed to be sooooo intuitive like walking? what's up with the multi-hour training?
besides that - does multi-hour mean 2 hours? or 5 hours? Worse yet - Non of the "mandated this many hours courses" I have ever attended lasted for the specific number of hourse.
Take, for example, in NY before you get a license you need a 5 hour (or somesuch) course. Not that I am complaining (that much) but the course ended after about three at a "DMV approved course center." - I say this because if the Segway was not as intuitive as they gloat, and a lenghty safty course was really necessary, then I'd fear of walking from now on - While bad drivers for the most part run into other cars, bad segway charioteers will mostly run into pedestrians.