Exactly. One of the things that was always controversial about Concorde was the sonic noise. I don't see how they intend to address this problem with their new scramjet.
Not only that, Concorde went out of business. People aren't willing to pay enough for SST to make it profitable... heck the subsonic airlines have a hard enough time staying afloat. Why would this succeed where Concorde failed?
True, and that's fine for accuracy within a few seconds. The NMEA data is always streaming through the RS232 lagged a little behind reality though, and there is a fair amount of jitter unless your GPS receiver can skip all the other NMEA sentences and only send the time (i.e., in the time it took to send positional data through the port, the timestamp now coming through is a few hundred milliseconds "old"). To get stratum 0 quality time from GPS, you need a slightly more expensive unit with PPS (Pulse Per Second) output.
Exactly. Roger Zelazny was the master of this, if you ask me. His novels are short and action-packed... the guy never wasted a word but you still get a feel for the setting and the characters. The first few paragraphs of Chapter 2 his first Amber novel, Nine Princes In Amber are a perfect example of balancing minutia with pacing.
I've always thought OTEC was a pretty neat idea, but it's not terribly efficient, which really drives up the cost per kilowatt. Geothermal is much more promising due to the larger temperature differential, but the barrier is still the cost. It's not really about saving the environment as it is about saving money. Sad but true, that's the world we live in. At some point, the price of oil will rise enough to make geothermal (and maybe even OTEC) economical, but my guess is we still have a few decades to go.
Wind power seems to be doing a good job for our initial transition/weaning from oil, but more long-term strategies are still needed... so good for these guys.
Reading the Chicago PDF, I see that members of watchman-guards or patrolman agencies can carry IF licensed by the State. I rather suspect that more than a few palms need to be greased to get such a license, but maybe I'm just pessimistic.
Nope. "Illinois has some of the most restrictive firearm laws in the country.... There is no state preemption of firearm laws, with the result that some localities have outlawed the possession of handguns.... Some municipalities, most notably Chicago, require that all firearms be registered with the local police department. Chicago does not allow the registration of handguns, which has the effect of outlawing their possession, unless they were grandfathered in by being registered before 1982.[29] Additionally, Cook County has banned assault weapons and magazines with the capacity to accept more than ten rounds of ammunition.[30]... Illinois is one of the few states that has no provision for the concealed carry of firearms by citizens. Open carry is also illegal, except when hunting. When a firearm is being transported, it must be unloaded and enclosed in a case."
NYC also tramples on the Bill of Rights. At least things are getting better in DC.
Illinois is one of the most anti-gun states, and Chicago has even more strict rules on top of that. It's almost as bad as Britain. About the only way you're going to have an armed security guard in Chicago is if he's actually a sworn law enforcement officer or you have *really* tight political connections to those in power.
In a more, uh... "free" state, yes, armed security is a realistic proposition. However such states usually have less violent crime too, so you don't need them as much.
I can get a movie... in my mailbox for an unlimited amount of time,
See, this is false economy. Every day you keep a movie, you are throwing money away. Netflix wants you to keep the movies a long time -- less postage and less labor for them. If you're paying $9/mo and only watch 1 movie a week, you're paying $2.25 for each of those -- and that's not much less than renting them at your local video store.
The only way to really make Netflix economical is to watch a movie the same day you get it and send it out the very next day. The Blockbuster plan has a leg up in that respect as you can drop off a movie at the store and get another with nearly 0 hour lag time. Less lag = more movies per month = more bang for your buck.
Of course, if you subscribe to Netflix to get less-popular movies in the "long tail", then it's less about price as it is about selection. But anyone looking to save money yet keeps their DVDs for days and weeks on end, isn't getting a very good deal.
It's highly unlikely this kid's GPS module system was using 3 or more satellites to triangulate his speed.
You're right, it was probably using at least 4 or 5. My $100 Garmin eTrex usually does. Maybe you've been asleep for the last 10 years, but even cheap GPS units have 12-channel parallel receivers these days.
AC for obvious reasons.
Yup, you obviously didn't want the karma hit for being a troll.
What I've often wondered is if it's possible to modify a jet engine to directly burn hydrogen, producing thrust directly rather than through a fuel cell -> electric ->propeller based system. The energy obviously wouldn't be free; the hydrogen would have to be produced from nuclear, solar, or some other power source. It would be expensive, but it might still let us keep our planes in the air.
Jet fuel has an energy density of 40 to 50 MJ/kg, hydrogen has 120 to 140, so I think you're on to something there. Google thinks so too:
I don't know if you can easily store enough hydrogen for a DC-10's transoceanic voyage in a dense enough manner though -- you might need some pretty large and heavy pressure vessels to contain it.
No, do not buy anything made by VIA. Mini-ITX is great, but I just got burned by VIA's southbridge DMA bug that they have not fixed in THREE years, nor do they make any attempt at looking like they care. Do yourself a favor and buy a Mini-ITX board, any board, without VIA chips on it.
The Military-Industrial complex wanted their cold war and the associated government spending back. The "War on Terror" is the perfect successor - it's a 'war' that can't be won, has no foreseeable end, and trillions will be spent on it.
It wouldn't be so bad if they weren't taking a bunch of civil rights along for the ride. In that sense, I prefer the Cold War and the threat of nuclear holocaust.
While I would love to see a diesel-electric hybrid car, you aren't going to see one flying. Batteries are too heavy, and there's only one diesel aircraft engine currently flying and they had to do a lot of engineering to get it light enough.
But a gyroplane would be the perfect flying car -- the rotor is unpowered, so you don't need a tail rotor sticking out the back. You can use a prerotator to shorten takeoff distance (a few gyros can even take off vertically), and the landing roll is also very short. When in car mode, the rotor is far easier to fold as it is so much smaller and it won't interfere with the driver's vision as the folded wings do.
A gyroplane also flies a lot more like a fixed-wing aircraft than like a helicopter, so the pilot training demands are MUCH lower than a heli (still more than a fixed-wing, though).
I pity the administrator who just got paged because this broke their kerberos domain and has to spend the whole weekend converting everything to GMT.
Funny you should mention that, we do do a lot of Kerberos authentication and it didn't break anything. A server at 3pm GMT is perfectly in sync with a client at 9am MDT (-6 GMT). IIRC Kerberos does all timestamps internally in GMT anyway, it just adds or subtracts the offset from the local time to get GMT and then sends GMT over the wire.
I solved this problem by changing wholesale to GMT/UTC on all of our servers, Linux and Windows. Now we never have to worry about another stupid DST or TZ change again, including MS charging $4K for a patch that should be free. It also makes life easier for people outside our TZ who use our servers.
I just learned that I go to work at 3pm in the morning and head home at 11pm. It's not hard. I wish the world would switch to GMT, it would make everything so much easier. Businesses can have summer hours if they wish to take advantage of the longer days.
Of course, the desktops are all still on local time. There would be a pitchforks-and-torches uprising if you tried to change that.;)
Not to mention the fact that hikers and backpackers have used $60 filter bottles for years now that do pretty much the same thing. Not only that, but I already have filter straws with activated carbon in my 72-hour kits. They cost about $10. Another company makes a small battery-powered water filter with a UV light in it to sterilize pathogens.
I'm to lazy to RTFA, but this thing sounds like a ridiculously expensive non-invention. The already existing, less-expensive technology might not get virii out, but you're generally not concerned with virii in drinking water -- it's the physical matter, bacteria, and cysts that are the main concern.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. One of the things that was always controversial about Concorde was the sonic noise. I don't see how they intend to address this problem with their new scramjet.
Not only that, Concorde went out of business. People aren't willing to pay enough for SST to make it profitable... heck the subsonic airlines have a hard enough time staying afloat. Why would this succeed where Concorde failed?
True, and that's fine for accuracy within a few seconds. The NMEA data is always streaming through the RS232 lagged a little behind reality though, and there is a fair amount of jitter unless your GPS receiver can skip all the other NMEA sentences and only send the time (i.e., in the time it took to send positional data through the port, the timestamp now coming through is a few hundred milliseconds "old"). To get stratum 0 quality time from GPS, you need a slightly more expensive unit with PPS (Pulse Per Second) output.
Exactly. Roger Zelazny was the master of this, if you ask me. His novels are short and action-packed... the guy never wasted a word but you still get a feel for the setting and the characters. The first few paragraphs of Chapter 2 his first Amber novel, Nine Princes In Amber are a perfect example of balancing minutia with pacing.
I've always thought OTEC was a pretty neat idea, but it's not terribly efficient, which really drives up the cost per kilowatt. Geothermal is much more promising due to the larger temperature differential, but the barrier is still the cost. It's not really about saving the environment as it is about saving money. Sad but true, that's the world we live in. At some point, the price of oil will rise enough to make geothermal (and maybe even OTEC) economical, but my guess is we still have a few decades to go.
Wind power seems to be doing a good job for our initial transition/weaning from oil, but more long-term strategies are still needed... so good for these guys.
NYC also tramples on the Bill of Rights. At least things are getting better in DC.
In a more, uh... "free" state, yes, armed security is a realistic proposition. However such states usually have less violent crime too, so you don't need them as much.
The only way to really make Netflix economical is to watch a movie the same day you get it and send it out the very next day. The Blockbuster plan has a leg up in that respect as you can drop off a movie at the store and get another with nearly 0 hour lag time. Less lag = more movies per month = more bang for your buck.
Of course, if you subscribe to Netflix to get less-popular movies in the "long tail", then it's less about price as it is about selection. But anyone looking to save money yet keeps their DVDs for days and weeks on end, isn't getting a very good deal.
Subterranean evacuated tubes address issues 1, 3, and 4.
http://www.google.com/search?q=hydrogen+jet+turbine
I don't know if you can easily store enough hydrogen for a DC-10's transoceanic voyage in a dense enough manner though -- you might need some pretty large and heavy pressure vessels to contain it.
No, do not buy anything made by VIA. Mini-ITX is great, but I just got burned by VIA's southbridge DMA bug that they have not fixed in THREE years, nor do they make any attempt at looking like they care. Do yourself a favor and buy a Mini-ITX board, any board, without VIA chips on it.
Here it is, in all 21 pages of glory starting back in 2004: http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.aspx?catid=28&threadid=60131&STARTPAGE=21&enterthread=y
While I would love to see a diesel-electric hybrid car, you aren't going to see one flying. Batteries are too heavy, and there's only one diesel aircraft engine currently flying and they had to do a lot of engineering to get it light enough.
But a gyroplane would be the perfect flying car -- the rotor is unpowered, so you don't need a tail rotor sticking out the back. You can use a prerotator to shorten takeoff distance (a few gyros can even take off vertically), and the landing roll is also very short. When in car mode, the rotor is far easier to fold as it is so much smaller and it won't interfere with the driver's vision as the folded wings do.
A gyroplane also flies a lot more like a fixed-wing aircraft than like a helicopter, so the pilot training demands are MUCH lower than a heli (still more than a fixed-wing, though).
I solved this problem by changing wholesale to GMT/UTC on all of our servers, Linux and Windows. Now we never have to worry about another stupid DST or TZ change again, including MS charging $4K for a patch that should be free. It also makes life easier for people outside our TZ who use our servers.
;)
I just learned that I go to work at 3pm in the morning and head home at 11pm. It's not hard. I wish the world would switch to GMT, it would make everything so much easier. Businesses can have summer hours if they wish to take advantage of the longer days.
Of course, the desktops are all still on local time. There would be a pitchforks-and-torches uprising if you tried to change that.
http://www.google.com/search?q=satellite+tv+long+cable+run+feet+OR+meters
Looks like 150-200ft without special cable or amplifiers. I'd guess 300ft would be possible.
Not to mention the fact that hikers and backpackers have used $60 filter bottles for years now that do pretty much the same thing. Not only that, but I already have filter straws with activated carbon in my 72-hour kits. They cost about $10. Another company makes a small battery-powered water filter with a UV light in it to sterilize pathogens.
I'm to lazy to RTFA, but this thing sounds like a ridiculously expensive non-invention. The already existing, less-expensive technology might not get virii out, but you're generally not concerned with virii in drinking water -- it's the physical matter, bacteria, and cysts that are the main concern.