Can NASA hold patents? I don't know, but I would think if they could, they could be pulling in alot more money from licensing technologies, giving them a bit of return on investment.
Actually, NASA does hold a lot of patents. These include things like goretex and I believe that they own the patent to velcro. They make quite a bit of money from those patents, which is good because it seems that the US Government is more interested in funding other programs like missle defence.
Re:Spam legislation won't stop the problem
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MAPS vs. ORBS
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Man I miss the days where when someone spammed, or crossposted unrelated material on usenet, their site was attacked by crackers and severly damaged. Unfortunately that it is illegal, and there are too many sites and people who need to be taught a lesson. Those were the good old days.
Sun, contrary to some peoples belief, is a hardware company at heart. They make most of their money selling Ultras, SunRays (a new product that replaces the dumb term, uses smart card authentication, and is cheaper than the cheapest PC out there), and services.
Sun could have decided to sell Solaris 8 instead of making it free, the media pack costs $75 but that is a drop in the bucket considering what you get. They could have decided to start charging for SO when they bought them, but they didn't.
Sun has several things on their mind and it isn't about trying to restrict access to their software. By GPLing SO they taking a jab at MS in several ways. The first is that it stays free, which, compared to the several hunderd dollers per license for MS Office, is very enticing, even to big companies because it is being supported by Sun. By causing even a couple businesses to switch over, I know one big one that is getting ready to, they stick it to MS. The second reason is that by GPLing it even the most picky of distros like Debian (I use Debian and love it) will be able to include it. Solaris is not a home user OS, but Sun believes that Linux is, and by doing this they are hoping that Linux will grow in the home user market and stick it to MS.
Sun doesn't plan on making any money SO, and there isn't any proprietary code that they feel is so important that they cannot release it so they are.
Leptons refer to the "light" particles. There are six leptons known of today, the electron, the muon, the tauon, the electron-neutrino, muon-neutrino, and tauon-neutrino.
Their are six flavors of quarks, the combination of them produces the mesons and hadrons. The mesons are particles like Kaons, they are the middle particles composed of two quarks. Protons and neutrons are examples of hadrons, or heavy particles composed of three quarks. The 6 flavors of quarks are: Up Down Charm Strange Bottom (originally called beauty) Top (originally called truth)
Each of these quarks have their respective anti-quarks. The proton has the combination of Up Up Down, and the neutron has Up Down Down. Quarks are always found in groups of two or three, the search for a single quark is being conducted but many believe that it will never be found. The last quark to be found was the Top quark, and it was theorised many years before it was actually found. There is a lot of research still be conducted on Top quarks because they are so new to the playing field.
There are a couple other fundemental particles that no one has mentioned. Those are the force particles and the Higgs Boson Field particle.
Both quarks and leptons are considered fermions, which is the classification of any particle with spin 1/2, 3/2, 5/2... The fundemental force particles, the photon, Z, W, gluon, and, assuming it exists, the graviton are considered bosons, or those with integer spin. All of those, except the graviton have spin 1, while the graviton has spin 2. The Higgs Boson is the really wierd one, is theoretically has spin zero, and is the fudge factor for giving particles mass in the standard model (its existance also breaks the standard model because it would technically have infinite mass).
There are theories out there like Supersymmetry which believe that at high energies all fundemental particles and forces have a supersymmetric partner. This supersymmetric partner has +/- 1/2 spin off of the low energy particle/force, so a fermions supersymmetric partner is a boson, and a bosons partner is a fermion. If Supersymmetry is true then we will roughly double the number of elementary particles.
OPEC isn't keeping fuel prices high, it is the gas companies here in the US. They have realized that they can charge extreme amounts of money for gas, and so they do. Right now there is an excess of oil in the US, there is no shortage that would cause higher prices.
OPEC is not charging large amounts for oil because they don't want to piss off their customers. I garentee that when OPEC drops their prices somemore this summer that we will see only a minor drop in price at the pumps and only for a short period of time.
Right now the gas companies are testing the waters, they want to see how much they can charge for maximal profit. So long as people continue to buy gas no matter how much they charge they will continue to increase.
In the US, if the price increases then we see it at the pump. If the price increases in Canada, the government can remove some of the excess taxes that they have placed on gas for social programs keeping the price relatively fixed.
I am thinking long term and I cannot afford it. I am a college student who would LOVE to have one of these things just to do decent size grocery runs and going to a good movie theatre. If I took out a loan I could afford to make payments on a Neon, but not an Insight.
I guess I will just wait for the price to drop, hopefully the car stays in production.
Unlike other hybrid designs, or electric cars, the electric motor is not the primary motor. It is used as a secondary "I need some more power" motor. If you are not using the batteries very often then you will not need to replace them very often.
What we have here is a good old case of the prisoners dilema. For those of you who have not heard of it I will give you a quick low down.
Two men are caught by the police. The police have enought evidence to send both of the men to jail for 3 years. Instead the police tell both that if they rat on the other then they will get off scott free and the other person gets 10 years. If both confess and rat on each other then each gets 7 years. In most cases it becomes best to be selfish because you know that the other person will be selfish, IE both loses.
This is fairly similar. If two cars are in a collision then both drivers are hurt. If I get a bigger car than I can "win the battle", and kill the other person. Unfortunately then it is best for everyone else to be selfish and buy the big car and then no one wins.
It is a myth that bigger equals safer. To some degree that is true, but most SUVs do not have adequite roll cages to support the weight of the SUV, if they have a roll cage at all. Also, SUVs are extremely top heavy, which increases the chance of rolling. If the SUV rolls and the roll cage cannot take the weight, or there is no roll cage, then you have a flat SUV. If you get hit by a car that is not a "featherweight deathbox", and the collison is not head on then there is a really good chance that you will tip and roll. If you tip and roll the chances of the roof on your SUV becoming crushed, trapping or killing you and your kids inside, increases exponetially. If you try to swerve away from that "drunk idiot" and you do it too quick, there is a good chance you will end up on your head, again being trapped or killed by the weight of the SUV.
Oh, and even those small cars can do it. My ex-girlfriend was in her truck when it got sideswipped by a small toyota, her truck, which isn't nearly as top heavy or easy to tip as a SUV, flipped.
If you REALLY want to be safe, and you REALLY want your children to be safe, do more research on the topic. The best bets are Volvos, Saabs, Saterns, and vehicles similar to the big towncars.
By the way, the average car today burn at roughly 30-50% effecient, which is really poor. All of the SUVs out there are in the 30%s. Thats 30% of the USEABLE energy. Some of the most effecient vehicles burn at 70-80%, but those are your standard "featherweight deathbox" cars. To finish your last sentince, Today's cars burn extremely hot, because that is where 50-70% of the useable energy is going.
<flame> Frankly, with the additude that you seem to have, I think you will be doing society a favor when you clean youself out of the gene-pool when your beloved SUV flips and crushes you. </flame>
The research is being done. I have a good friend that is working with a cheap way of mass producing solar cells. Right now they are at 10% effeciency, if they can hit 15% effeciency, which it may this summer, then it becomes more viable because they become easier and cheaper to produce.
As computing becomes more powerful the ability to simulate fusion plants becomes more viable, ~9 FLOPs per particle. We do need to keep funding that research though, nuclear physics research is a dieing field in the US (other than weapon production) because it doesn't get funded. I was surprised that the laser at Lawrence Livermore Labs was produced.
I hate to place a rant here but it seems suited so. <rant> One area of scientific research that would push the development of a better source of energy is space research. The ability to power a space craft to other planets and for space exploration will require new sources of power. The technology that we have today is, although adequite, not at the level that would allow for "affordable" and effecient space travel.
By funding the space program the research for better power plants would follow, and would approach it from non-standard directions. </rant>
Research is being done. The US just isn't funding it as well as they should.
ICANN insists on having my name, address, and email. What they don't say is what they're going to do with this info.
According to the website it says:
If your membership or vote is challenged as part of an At Large audit process, you must agree to furnish suitable documentation of your legal identity, address, country of residence, and age.
They want your info so that they can prove that you exist. This is in case someone demands a recount of the votes, and can show some unfair play, they can insure that everyone is a real person.
Up until I went off to college, 1997, WP Suite still owned more than 50% of the business office market. MS Office 95 had just under 40%, and Lotis had roughly 10%.
Actually, cars are the problem. Today, a typical car is about 30-50% effectient, the rest of the energy is converted to heat. A typical oil powerplant is a lot more effecient than your average car. That is why the electric car would be a better choice than a gas car, in terms of air polution. Probably the only cars that are close to the effeciency of a powerplant are these new hybrid cars which burn at ~80-90% effeciency.
As for a new power source to replace the oil and coal, what do you suggest? Wind is highly ineffecient, on a blustery day maybe 40% of the windmills are moving, and considering the amount of space each windmill takes, 40% is not very good.
Solar, the typical solar cell is too expensive and is ~15% effecient. There are cells that have hit ~30% effeciency but those are ungodly expensive, to the point of not being practical.
Water power is extremely effecient, but at the same time it has its own eco problems. Water that exits from a hydroelectric plant is generally a lot colder than the water from the natural stream that it came from. This interferes with the spawing of fish, and other wildlife.
How about nuclear? Fusion is a good 100 years away, and fision is really expensive and I don't think that you want what they give back.
We are in a no win situation. Do you want to make a difference, buy one of the new Honda or Toyota hybrid cars. They are expensive but they are the most eco friendly vechicle we have today. Also, add solar collectors to your house, maybe your children can experience the benifit of the savings overrunning the cost, until then you will be helping save the planet.
Although both Honda and Toyota have come out with hybrid cars, one limiting factor is price. The Honda Insight costs > $19000 and the Toyota Prius conts >$20000. Sure, they are first generation vechicles, but if they aren't shown as profitable then they will probably be deep sixed.
Personally, if I wasn't a poor student that can't afford to spen $19000 on a car, I would buy one of them. The Insight has a 10.5 gallon tank, and can go 61 miles/gallon in city driving. Imagine not having to fill your gas tank for >600 miles.
Corel's product evolved from two separate companies' products (Borland Quattro and Paradox, WordPerfect) and really never had the advantage of good integration during the critical days before Microsoft locked up the suite market.
I have a couple things to say about this. First, WordPerfect, and the suites that contained it, held the market until MS Office 97 came out. MS Office 97 was the first to break conversions, force upgrades from 95, and force the OEM's to bundle it.
MS Office 97 was also the first of the MS Offices where Excel finally was exceedingly better than Quattro Pro. Until Quattro Pro 9, very little had been done to Quattro Pro because it had been such a good product and no one wanted to break it. Unfortunately when Excel could boast drastic improvements over Quattro Pro, that placed a gaping hole in WP Office. The other products, WP, Presentations, Paradox, etc..., were roughly equal or only slightly better, but when the weakest link is the spreadsheet then people will turn elsewhere.
Another major problem occured because of Novell. Anyone who was a WP fan and tried using Novell WP Suite 6 with NT knows exactly what that problem is. Novell saw NT 4.0 as the enemy, mainly because like Novell servers, NT 4.0 servers gain performance increases by placing most of their calls at rung zero. WP had the marketshare in the office products at that time, and Novell in their infinite wisdom believe that they could kill NT by not porting WP over. Novell was ignorant about the fact that MS Office 95 was a good product (one of Microsofts few), it was stable, as powerful as WP, and compatable. Even after they started to lose marketshare hand over fist to Office 95 they didn't budge. Eventually they sold WP Suite 6 to Corel, who spent quite a bit of time working on a port to NT.
Corel isn't without its stupid mistakes though. A couple years ago when Java was first starting to take off they tried to port the entire WP suite over to Java. This was in the Java 1.0 stages, it didn't have printer support yet! Whoops.
It was nothing about integration that killed WP Office. I have used WP sence WP 5 for DOS, and used Novell WP Office 6, and Corel WP Offices 7, and 8. I have seen it fall from its glory days, and I know why it has. I have even just recently ordered WP 2000 for Linux, to support the company and to get a good office product for my home machine.
I give Corel until New Year's. Max. I agree that they probably won't survive, but I would give them until begining to mid 1st quarter. After which WP will probably just move over to another companies hands.
Corel is placing their entire companies future into Linux. They are porting everything that they have, during which time they are giving need support to the WINE team, and PR. If or when they die it will be a sad day.
I am yet to meet a fat veggie Reminds me of a bad joke, what is the hardest part of a vegitable to eat? The wheelchair.
But seriously,not all meat is bad. Fish are made of meat and yet according to scientific reports fish, especially shellfish, are good for you because they contain "good" fat and "good" cholesterol.
On top of that there is one B vitamin that is not found in anything but meat. It is also much easier to eat meat to make sure that you have all of your necessary proteins rather than deal with having to make sure that you mix the proper foods together to get everything. Before I get flamed about how it is easy to do that, ie black beans, tofu, soy beans etc..., I have meet several unhealthy vegitarians because they don't watch what they eat.
According to scientific reports having too little saturated fat is actually BAD for you. There are some uses for saturated fat. Why do you think so many places that serve vegitarian dishes have avocodos, not just because the taste good but because the provide saturated fat.
Although the average meat eater is generally a less healthy person than the average vegitarian, the meat eaters that I know who know what they are doing are healthier people than anyone else that I know. Considering I live in Boulder, CO, which was labeled the healthiest city in the US...
Ok, so the reviewers are getting free software from several major Linux distributions, like Mandrake and RedHat. Of course, they could also just download it for free. The idea that reviews are being bought with free software seems kind of, well, odd.
I knew that reviewers were cheep but horing themselves off for free copies of free software seems a bit overboard.
What seems really odd is that this same process doesn't seem to cause reviewers to not rip apart the latest version Windows.
Something smells rotten and I don't think it is the free fish that the penguins are giving out.
I've yet to see anyone sue Honda for the cars they produce. After all criminals can use cars to make a getaway, so Honda must be at fault!
In the mid-80's to late 90's small plane manufactures like Cesna(sp?) stopped producting new planes. The reason behind this was that everytime they produced a new plane that had new safety features, and then some bozo flying an older model that didn't have those safety features screws up big time and kills himself, the family of that bozo would sue because the older model didn't have the safety features of the brand new one. They sued even in the most extreme cases of pilot error and where those new safety features would not have helped. The worst part is that they would win almost every time!
Finally Congress fixed that problem and those planes are now being produced again. Before then it would be like sueing Ford because you got injured in your '37 Ford, and that injury could have been prevented if you had a seat belt (which weren't offered in Fords until the 50's).
Same sort of deal here though. This is a case of gross "pilot error" and yet the company is being sued. It ain't new.
Sure its refreshing but I think that this is just revenge for a major record label not signing his band and promoting him like they do Britney Spears. (aagghh, bad picture of Orrin Hatch in school girl uniform get out of my head, bad bad bad)
That and the fact that he doesn't want to be ostricized by his fellow congressmen when 200,000 (~1% of the 20 million) Napster users complain to their congressmen when (if, now) it gets shutdown.
[For those of you with a different sense of humor, or none at all, this is a joke]
mikerich has quite a bit more info but one thing that he forgot that is quite important to the design of the proton rocket. Most rockets designed by US companies has been one engine, multiple stages, no failure. This idea is fine, but if there is a failure in that one engine then the rocket is hosed. Russian designed rockets are multiple engines per stage, little failure. That way if one of the many engines happens to fail, and not blow up, the rocket still has the ability to succeed.
Imagine taking many smaller rockets and strapping them together and placing an outer coating on it, and that is the Russian design. We are starting to do that, the Space Shuttle has three engines in the rear so if one fails then the shuttle isn't lost. This design also allows for higher payloads because it is much easier to expand the design, unlike US rockets where we redesign the entire rocket instead of just adding more smaller ones.
OT, I don't know about where you live but all of the pizza huts here in colorado have been merged with taco bell. So I would be saying that I am going to the pizza bell, or the taco hut.
One thing that you forgot the mention is durability. When MIR was launched in 1986 it was supposed to have a 5 year life time, about what the ISS is supposed to have, and the damned thing is still around.
Although the Russians are sound technically and scientifically, they lack one major component. They aren't sound economically. This prevents them from being completely on par, if not ahead of us, scientifically and technically.
...the math demonstrated "the roots of the gravitational theory and modern calculus."
Newton's work on gravitational theory, although started on his own, was fueled by letters from Hooke (the spring man). Acording to a lecture givin by an expert on Newtons life, Hooke was working on gravitational theory, trying to solve Keplers laws, by use of geometry and was hitting some problems and sent some letters to Newton. Newton at the time was only considered the greatest geometrist around (he hadn't published calculus yet), Hooke was asking for some help with his math. Apparently Newton sent back a letter with a few calculations of his own on gravitational theory, almost mocking Hookes attempts to create a theory of gravity. Hooke continued to ask for help, sending more letters with more of his work, and apparently Newton used some of his ideas. If Hooke had been a better mathematician, it might have been Hookes theory of gravity.
What we now term calculus uses methods based primarily on Newton's theory and notation based on Leibniz's work.
Actually, from what I have been told, we use primarily Leibniz for both theory and notation. From my understanding, Newton didn't really have a grasp of the infintesimal, he obviously used it to a degree but his notation doesn't lend itself to the introduction of it, where as Leibniz notation does.
To clarify for those who have had calculus but don't know the difference, Newton used the "prime" notation. x - variable x' - first derivative x'' - second derivative Leibniz used the d/dx notation. f(x) - variable with respect to x df(x)/dx- first derivative etc...
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Can NASA hold patents? I don't know, but I would think if they could, they could be pulling in alot more money from licensing technologies, giving them a bit of return on investment.
Actually, NASA does hold a lot of patents. These include things like goretex and I believe that they own the patent to velcro. They make quite a bit of money from those patents, which is good because it seems that the US Government is more interested in funding other programs like missle defence.
Man I miss the days where when someone spammed, or crossposted unrelated material on usenet, their site was attacked by crackers and severly damaged. Unfortunately that it is illegal, and there are too many sites and people who need to be taught a lesson.
Those were the good old days.
Sun, contrary to some peoples belief, is a hardware company at heart. They make most of their money selling Ultras, SunRays (a new product that replaces the dumb term, uses smart card authentication, and is cheaper than the cheapest PC out there), and services.
Sun could have decided to sell Solaris 8 instead of making it free, the media pack costs $75 but that is a drop in the bucket considering what you get. They could have decided to start charging for SO when they bought them, but they didn't.
Sun has several things on their mind and it isn't about trying to restrict access to their software. By GPLing SO they taking a jab at MS in several ways. The first is that it stays free, which, compared to the several hunderd dollers per license for MS Office, is very enticing, even to big companies because it is being supported by Sun. By causing even a couple businesses to switch over, I know one big one that is getting ready to, they stick it to MS. The second reason is that by GPLing it even the most picky of distros like Debian (I use Debian and love it) will be able to include it. Solaris is not a home user OS, but Sun believes that Linux is, and by doing this they are hoping that Linux will grow in the home user market and stick it to MS.
Sun doesn't plan on making any money SO, and there isn't any proprietary code that they feel is so important that they cannot release it so they are.
Leptons refer to the "light" particles. There are six leptons known of today, the electron, the muon, the tauon, the electron-neutrino, muon-neutrino, and tauon-neutrino.
Their are six flavors of quarks, the combination of them produces the mesons and hadrons. The mesons are particles like Kaons, they are the middle particles composed of two quarks. Protons and neutrons are examples of hadrons, or heavy particles composed of three quarks.
The 6 flavors of quarks are:
Up
Down
Charm
Strange
Bottom (originally called beauty)
Top (originally called truth)
Each of these quarks have their respective anti-quarks. The proton has the combination of Up Up Down, and the neutron has Up Down Down. Quarks are always found in groups of two or three, the search for a single quark is being conducted but many believe that it will never be found. The last quark to be found was the Top quark, and it was theorised many years before it was actually found. There is a lot of research still be conducted on Top quarks because they are so new to the playing field.
There are a couple other fundemental particles that no one has mentioned. Those are the force particles and the Higgs Boson Field particle.
Both quarks and leptons are considered fermions, which is the classification of any particle with spin 1/2, 3/2, 5/2... The fundemental force particles, the photon, Z, W, gluon, and, assuming it exists, the graviton are considered bosons, or those with integer spin. All of those, except the graviton have spin 1, while the graviton has spin 2. The Higgs Boson is the really wierd one, is theoretically has spin zero, and is the fudge factor for giving particles mass in the standard model (its existance also breaks the standard model because it would technically have infinite mass).
There are theories out there like Supersymmetry which believe that at high energies all fundemental particles and forces have a supersymmetric partner. This supersymmetric partner has +/- 1/2 spin off of the low energy particle/force, so a fermions supersymmetric partner is a boson, and a bosons partner is a fermion. If Supersymmetry is true then we will roughly double the number of elementary particles.
If you want to learn more about particle physics then go to the particle data group site.
If OPEC keeps fuel prices high
OPEC isn't keeping fuel prices high, it is the gas companies here in the US. They have realized that they can charge extreme amounts of money for gas, and so they do. Right now there is an excess of oil in the US, there is no shortage that would cause higher prices.
OPEC is not charging large amounts for oil because they don't want to piss off their customers. I garentee that when OPEC drops their prices somemore this summer that we will see only a minor drop in price at the pumps and only for a short period of time.
Right now the gas companies are testing the waters, they want to see how much they can charge for maximal profit. So long as people continue to buy gas no matter how much they charge they will continue to increase.
In the US, if the price increases then we see it at the pump. If the price increases in Canada, the government can remove some of the excess taxes that they have placed on gas for social programs keeping the price relatively fixed.
I am thinking long term and I cannot afford it. I am a college student who would LOVE to have one of these things just to do decent size grocery runs and going to a good movie theatre. If I took out a loan I could afford to make payments on a Neon, but not an Insight.
I guess I will just wait for the price to drop, hopefully the car stays in production.
Unlike other hybrid designs, or electric cars, the electric motor is not the primary motor. It is used as a secondary "I need some more power" motor. If you are not using the batteries very often then you will not need to replace them very often.
What we have here is a good old case of the prisoners dilema. For those of you who have not heard of it I will give you a quick low down.
Two men are caught by the police. The police have enought evidence to send both of the men to jail for 3 years. Instead the police tell both that if they rat on the other then they will get off scott free and the other person gets 10 years. If both confess and rat on each other then each gets 7 years. In most cases it becomes best to be selfish because you know that the other person will be selfish, IE both loses.
This is fairly similar. If two cars are in a collision then both drivers are hurt. If I get a bigger car than I can "win the battle", and kill the other person. Unfortunately then it is best for everyone else to be selfish and buy the big car and then no one wins.
It is a myth that bigger equals safer. To some degree that is true, but most SUVs do not have adequite roll cages to support the weight of the SUV, if they have a roll cage at all. Also, SUVs are extremely top heavy, which increases the chance of rolling. If the SUV rolls and the roll cage cannot take the weight, or there is no roll cage, then you have a flat SUV. If you get hit by a car that is not a "featherweight deathbox", and the collison is not head on then there is a really good chance that you will tip and roll. If you tip and roll the chances of the roof on your SUV becoming crushed, trapping or killing you and your kids inside, increases exponetially. If you try to swerve away from that "drunk idiot" and you do it too quick, there is a good chance you will end up on your head, again being trapped or killed by the weight of the SUV.
Oh, and even those small cars can do it. My ex-girlfriend was in her truck when it got sideswipped by a small toyota, her truck, which isn't nearly as top heavy or easy to tip as a SUV, flipped.
If you REALLY want to be safe, and you REALLY want your children to be safe, do more research on the topic. The best bets are Volvos, Saabs, Saterns, and vehicles similar to the big towncars.
By the way, the average car today burn at roughly 30-50% effecient, which is really poor. All of the SUVs out there are in the 30%s. Thats 30% of the USEABLE energy. Some of the most effecient vehicles burn at 70-80%, but those are your standard "featherweight deathbox" cars. To finish your last sentince, Today's cars burn extremely hot, because that is where 50-70% of the useable energy is going.
<flame>
Frankly, with the additude that you seem to have, I think you will be doing society a favor when you clean youself out of the gene-pool when your beloved SUV flips and crushes you.
</flame>
REPENT OR BE STRUCK DOWN BY FIRE AND BRIMSTONE!
Or if nothing else more charged particles and radiation will hit you.
Oh never mind. I guess it wasn't that funny anyway.
The research is being done. I have a good friend that is working with a cheap way of mass producing solar cells. Right now they are at 10% effeciency, if they can hit 15% effeciency, which it may this summer, then it becomes more viable because they become easier and cheaper to produce.
As computing becomes more powerful the ability to simulate fusion plants becomes more viable, ~9 FLOPs per particle. We do need to keep funding that research though, nuclear physics research is a dieing field in the US (other than weapon production) because it doesn't get funded. I was surprised that the laser at Lawrence Livermore Labs was produced.
I hate to place a rant here but it seems suited so.
<rant>
One area of scientific research that would push the development of a better source of energy is space research. The ability to power a space craft to other planets and for space exploration will require new sources of power. The technology that we have today is, although adequite, not at the level that would allow for "affordable" and effecient space travel.
By funding the space program the research for better power plants would follow, and would approach it from non-standard directions.
</rant>
Research is being done. The US just isn't funding it as well as they should.
According to the website it says:
They want your info so that they can prove that you exist. This is in case someone demands a recount of the votes, and can show some unfair play, they can insure that everyone is a real person.
Up until I went off to college, 1997, WP Suite still owned more than 50% of the business office market. MS Office 95 had just under 40%, and Lotis had roughly 10%.
Actually, cars are the problem. Today, a typical car is about 30-50% effectient, the rest of the energy is converted to heat. A typical oil powerplant is a lot more effecient than your average car. That is why the electric car would be a better choice than a gas car, in terms of air polution. Probably the only cars that are close to the effeciency of a powerplant are these new hybrid cars which burn at ~80-90% effeciency.
As for a new power source to replace the oil and coal, what do you suggest? Wind is highly ineffecient, on a blustery day maybe 40% of the windmills are moving, and considering the amount of space each windmill takes, 40% is not very good.
Solar, the typical solar cell is too expensive and is ~15% effecient. There are cells that have hit ~30% effeciency but those are ungodly expensive, to the point of not being practical.
Water power is extremely effecient, but at the same time it has its own eco problems. Water that exits from a hydroelectric plant is generally a lot colder than the water from the natural stream that it came from. This interferes with the spawing of fish, and other wildlife.
How about nuclear? Fusion is a good 100 years away, and fision is really expensive and I don't think that you want what they give back.
We are in a no win situation. Do you want to make a difference, buy one of the new Honda or Toyota hybrid cars. They are expensive but they are the most eco friendly vechicle we have today. Also, add solar collectors to your house, maybe your children can experience the benifit of the savings overrunning the cost, until then you will be helping save the planet.
Although both Honda and Toyota have come out with hybrid cars, one limiting factor is price. The Honda Insight costs > $19000 and the Toyota Prius conts >$20000. Sure, they are first generation vechicles, but if they aren't shown as profitable then they will probably be deep sixed.
Personally, if I wasn't a poor student that can't afford to spen $19000 on a car, I would buy one of them. The Insight has a 10.5 gallon tank, and can go 61 miles/gallon in city driving. Imagine not having to fill your gas tank for >600 miles.
Go hybrid. The Honda Insite uses a small effecient gas powered engine to charge the batteries it uses to go.
One small problem, it costs $19000 right now.
Corel's product evolved from two separate companies' products (Borland Quattro and Paradox, WordPerfect) and really never had the advantage of good integration during the critical days before Microsoft locked up the suite market.
I have a couple things to say about this. First, WordPerfect, and the suites that contained it, held the market until MS Office 97 came out. MS Office 97 was the first to break conversions, force upgrades from 95, and force the OEM's to bundle it.
MS Office 97 was also the first of the MS Offices where Excel finally was exceedingly better than Quattro Pro. Until Quattro Pro 9, very little had been done to Quattro Pro because it had been such a good product and no one wanted to break it. Unfortunately when Excel could boast drastic improvements over Quattro Pro, that placed a gaping hole in WP Office. The other products, WP, Presentations, Paradox, etc..., were roughly equal or only slightly better, but when the weakest link is the spreadsheet then people will turn elsewhere.
Another major problem occured because of Novell. Anyone who was a WP fan and tried using Novell WP Suite 6 with NT knows exactly what that problem is. Novell saw NT 4.0 as the enemy, mainly because like Novell servers, NT 4.0 servers gain performance increases by placing most of their calls at rung zero. WP had the marketshare in the office products at that time, and Novell in their infinite wisdom believe that they could kill NT by not porting WP over. Novell was ignorant about the fact that MS Office 95 was a good product (one of Microsofts few), it was stable, as powerful as WP, and compatable. Even after they started to lose marketshare hand over fist to Office 95 they didn't budge. Eventually they sold WP Suite 6 to Corel, who spent quite a bit of time working on a port to NT.
Corel isn't without its stupid mistakes though. A couple years ago when Java was first starting to take off they tried to port the entire WP suite over to Java. This was in the Java 1.0 stages, it didn't have printer support yet! Whoops.
It was nothing about integration that killed WP Office. I have used WP sence WP 5 for DOS, and used Novell WP Office 6, and Corel WP Offices 7, and 8. I have seen it fall from its glory days, and I know why it has. I have even just recently ordered WP 2000 for Linux, to support the company and to get a good office product for my home machine.
I give Corel until New Year's. Max.
I agree that they probably won't survive, but I would give them until begining to mid 1st quarter. After which WP will probably just move over to another companies hands.
Corel is placing their entire companies future into Linux. They are porting everything that they have, during which time they are giving need support to the WINE team, and PR. If or when they die it will be a sad day.
I am yet to meet a fat veggie
Reminds me of a bad joke, what is the hardest part of a vegitable to eat?
The wheelchair.
But seriously,not all meat is bad. Fish are made of meat and yet according to scientific reports fish, especially shellfish, are good for you because they contain "good" fat and "good" cholesterol.
On top of that there is one B vitamin that is not found in anything but meat. It is also much easier to eat meat to make sure that you have all of your necessary proteins rather than deal with having to make sure that you mix the proper foods together to get everything. Before I get flamed about how it is easy to do that, ie black beans, tofu, soy beans etc..., I have meet several unhealthy vegitarians because they don't watch what they eat.
According to scientific reports having too little saturated fat is actually BAD for you. There are some uses for saturated fat. Why do you think so many places that serve vegitarian dishes have avocodos, not just because the taste good but because the provide saturated fat.
Although the average meat eater is generally a less healthy person than the average vegitarian, the meat eaters that I know who know what they are doing are healthier people than anyone else that I know. Considering I live in Boulder, CO, which was labeled the healthiest city in the US...
Ok, so the reviewers are getting free software from several major Linux distributions, like Mandrake and RedHat. Of course, they could also just download it for free. The idea that reviews are being bought with free software seems kind of, well, odd.
I knew that reviewers were cheep but horing themselves off for free copies of free software seems a bit overboard.
What seems really odd is that this same process doesn't seem to cause reviewers to not rip apart the latest version Windows.
Something smells rotten and I don't think it is the free fish that the penguins are giving out.
I've yet to see anyone sue Honda for the cars they produce. After all criminals can use cars to make a getaway, so Honda must be at fault!
In the mid-80's to late 90's small plane manufactures like Cesna(sp?) stopped producting new planes. The reason behind this was that everytime they produced a new plane that had new safety features, and then some bozo flying an older model that didn't have those safety features screws up big time and kills himself, the family of that bozo would sue because the older model didn't have the safety features of the brand new one. They sued even in the most extreme cases of pilot error and where those new safety features would not have helped. The worst part is that they would win almost every time!
Finally Congress fixed that problem and those planes are now being produced again. Before then it would be like sueing Ford because you got injured in your '37 Ford, and that injury could have been prevented if you had a seat belt (which weren't offered in Fords until the 50's).
Same sort of deal here though. This is a case of gross "pilot error" and yet the company is being sued. It ain't new.
Sure its refreshing but I think that this is just revenge for a major record label not signing his band and promoting him like they do Britney Spears. (aagghh, bad picture of Orrin Hatch in school girl uniform get out of my head, bad bad bad)
That and the fact that he doesn't want to be ostricized by his fellow congressmen when 200,000 (~1% of the 20 million) Napster users complain to their congressmen when (if, now) it gets shutdown.
[For those of you with a different sense of humor, or none at all, this is a joke]
mikerich has quite a bit more info but one thing that he forgot that is quite important to the design of the proton rocket. Most rockets designed by US companies has been one engine, multiple stages, no failure. This idea is fine, but if there is a failure in that one engine then the rocket is hosed. Russian designed rockets are multiple engines per stage, little failure. That way if one of the many engines happens to fail, and not blow up, the rocket still has the ability to succeed.
Imagine taking many smaller rockets and strapping them together and placing an outer coating on it, and that is the Russian design. We are starting to do that, the Space Shuttle has three engines in the rear so if one fails then the shuttle isn't lost. This design also allows for higher payloads because it is much easier to expand the design, unlike US rockets where we redesign the entire rocket instead of just adding more smaller ones.
OT, I don't know about where you live but all of the pizza huts here in colorado have been merged with taco bell. So I would be saying that I am going to the pizza bell, or the taco hut.
And, no I haven't seen Gorbichov there yet.
One thing that you forgot the mention is durability. When MIR was launched in 1986 it was supposed to have a 5 year life time, about what the ISS is supposed to have, and the damned thing is still around.
Although the Russians are sound technically and scientifically, they lack one major component. They aren't sound economically. This prevents them from being completely on par, if not ahead of us, scientifically and technically.
...the math demonstrated "the roots of the gravitational theory and modern calculus."
Newton's work on gravitational theory, although started on his own, was fueled by letters from Hooke (the spring man). Acording to a lecture givin by an expert on Newtons life, Hooke was working on gravitational theory, trying to solve Keplers laws, by use of geometry and was hitting some problems and sent some letters to Newton. Newton at the time was only considered the greatest geometrist around (he hadn't published calculus yet), Hooke was asking for some help with his math. Apparently Newton sent back a letter with a few calculations of his own on gravitational theory, almost mocking Hookes attempts to create a theory of gravity. Hooke continued to ask for help, sending more letters with more of his work, and apparently Newton used some of his ideas. If Hooke had been a better mathematician, it might have been Hookes theory of gravity.
What we now term calculus uses methods based primarily on Newton's theory and notation based on Leibniz's work.
Actually, from what I have been told, we use primarily Leibniz for both theory and notation. From my understanding, Newton didn't really have a grasp of the infintesimal, he obviously used it to a degree but his notation doesn't lend itself to the introduction of it, where as Leibniz notation does.
To clarify for those who have had calculus but don't know the difference, Newton used the "prime" notation.
x - variable
x' - first derivative
x'' - second derivative
Leibniz used the d/dx notation.
f(x) - variable with respect to x
df(x)/dx- first derivative
etc...