That said, it is still first generation, proof of concept. With any luck we (as in we 'the world') will take advantage of all of the findings they uncover on their eight month 'journey of discovery' - doing things that people already do, but doing them from a completely different perspective... can often point out plenty of inefficiencies that we have learned to accept or work around, and if they find a way to fix any of these (because they approached the problem from a different direction) then all the different boating types will benefit.
In the 'pedal powered flight' slant - what if that guy stumbled across the whole 'winglets increase lift by doing something completely different with the wing-tip vortexes (vorticii?)' thing while trying to make his pedal powered plane more efficient, studying wing design? He didn't, but if he had and the rest of the aeronautical world adopted it - it wouldn't have been a breakthrough in pedal powered flight, but certainly a breakthrough that benefits the entire industry.
Think hull design (getting one more knot out of a more efficient hull design would be worth 20% faster ship), more slippery hull materials, possibly even organic (ditto on the speed benefits), maybe some sort of massive chemical battery using a copper hull and a lead or zinc hull with salt water doing some chemical reaction (yea, this one is a bit far fetched, but still)... never know when you are going to discover something completely unrelated, yet incredibly cool (ie, the history of Velcro)
Actually half a million isn't unreasonable for a brand new 46' Trans-Atlantic capable powerboat / sailboat. Price out a nice new Sea Ray Sundancer, last I checked their Sundancer 460 (roughly 46' of real space, like 51' tip to tip) model runs between half and three quarters of a Meg.
That said, I like the earlier idea of making the sails out of solar collector material (memories of Tron come to mind) and using that juice to fill up the batteries, run those the massive electric motors like this thing does.
Not unlike electric cars of only a few years ago. It's a prototype, first generation stuff just to prove the concept.
They get this whole 'electric boat' concept worked out and they will streamline the process, build on the knowledge they get during the first few generations and eventually they will reshape the hull into a more efficient shape (perhaps take clues from large sea-borne mammals like the dolphin or whale), establish a more effective way to create electricity (such as perhaps an onboard diesel generator with massive arrays of batteries to hold the electricity... or maybe even self contained little mini nuclear reactors) and once the need to use sunlight is removed they could even make them water-tight from all directions, smooth out the shapes some and add a little ballast to let the ship ride lower in the water (to minimize the effects of surface weather / waves) - possibly even under the water. It could revolutionize the way we interact with the ocean.
Ooh - now there's an idea for a new power company :
Soylent Green Energy - the only electric company using Earth's most abundant renewable resource.
No more strip mining for coal, no longer dependent on foreign oil, no more destroying forests - Go Green! If you want Green Energy, then you want Soylent Green Energy!
Probably a shitload cheaper to set off a nuke than to simulate it, too, come to give it some serious consideration. Just crack the seal on one, turn it loose and a'splode it - see what happens. Maybe schedule it for the 4th of July next year, get a double bang for your buck.
What they are doing now is akin to buying a gazillion dollars worth of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, keeping it in the freezer for four decades and then spending another gazillion dollars in software and hardware to determine if it still tastes good.
Burning hydrogen = 2H2 + O2 = 2H20 (exothermic reaction, meaning it releases energy in the form of heat) Splitting water = 2H2O + energy (generally electricity) => 2H2 + O2
The magic here is that the amount of energy released in the first reaction actually exceeds the amount of energy it takes to reform the bond in the second reaction. Small difference, but it is there. The big problem is that none of the means we have to convert that heat back into electricity are anywhere near efficient enough to take advantage of that little wonder of science. If there was a way to convert the heat released into the kind of energy it takes to split the water that was 100% efficient this would probably work.
For reference, a quick Google search leads me to believe that most commercial power plants (the big ones) are about 35% efficient, and 60% efficiency is considered really, really good for a power gen plant.
They could hook up a big version of the device with some blades or something, let the wind push it around in order to move the different parts through the various magnetic fields - making a net positive return of energy...
This is actually two-fold, if I had to guess. First you are right, it completely (or almost completely) eliminates the hassles of typo's in the URL. Personally I have gone to the wrong web site one too many times after typing in cmm.com (for CNN) or whatever - if I type it in on the Google search bar built into Firefox and Google likes it, I click it. The second reason : no history of going there in the drop-down box. I still haven't figured out in IE how to remove a single recently visited site from the URL dropdown box without clearing out the whole damn thing, and just because someone types www. in the URL bar I don't want it using recent (or old) history to list all the sites I have visited in the past week.
There was a hostage situation in Iran where a few of his employees were taken hostage - and he hired mercenaries to go in and rescue them. Hell yea I'd work for Ross Perot, even if he needed me to travel overseas for the position. Damn straight I would:-)
What does that have to do with the story (around which this discussion thread revolves)?
The guy (evidently his name is 'Neftaly Cruz') was standing in his back yard, sees a couple of cops taking down a drug dealer (maybe a lite version of some 'Rodney King beatdown') and whips out his camera phone, take a picture.
Cop walks into his back yard, grabs him, body slams him on the cop car and arrests him. For taking a picture of an event happening on a public street. Fucking arrested. Personally I think this is about the most KGB shit I have ever heard of - and yes, I watched it happen in Moscow with my own two eyes.
Riddle me this, Batman : when does 'got arrested' ever come off your personal life record? As in when a prospective employer says 'have you ever been arrested?'
Answer : never. If the charges get dropped you can always say 'Yes, but... ' and then fill in the rest of the story about how 'bad cop' or 'violated my rights' or whatever, but the employer checks the 'got arrested' box and you don't get hired.
For taking a picture of events happening on a public street.
Damn, it almost would have gone better if it went down like this : Cop : (Body slam on car) You know why I'm arresting you? Cruz : Because I took your picture with my camera phone? Cop : No silly, it's because you're brown!
If you don't think that an entire division of Indians somewhere doesn't have unlimited unrestricted and unaudited access to 100% of your personal financial history, enough data to recreate your entire financial identity well enough to 'become' you - you are sadly mistaken and quite possibly in for a very rude awakening.
If Al Qaeda really wanted to destroy the US economy, they would quit futzing around with the high risk / low reward threats on US soil and just walk a nuke into one of the massive tech centers and level the entire industrial complex. IBM has centers totaling 40,000 employees and a gazillion dollars worth of investments? Tons of other companies too? Your 20kT nuke scenario would destroy the US economy on a scale that would make 9/11 look like a kindergarden cakewalk.
Luckily Al Qaeda doesn't have the balls or the skill to pull something like this off - or maybe they are just scared.
Anybody know how to contact Johnny Cash? I think we have the makings of a great song here. 'and I shot a stripper in Vegas, just to watch the cash fly...'
You want to enhance the 'scary factor' a bit? Ethanol++
Mix up a few drinks (I recommend Crown & Coke for the youngin's, and a good single malt over ice for the mature audience) and get your blood alcohol content up around where it is no longer legal to drive. Turn out the lights in your game room, use headphones instead of speakers. Isolate yourself from reality (both physically and mentally) and let the alcohol help remove the suspension of disbelief - Doom III scared the shit out of me and I have been gaming for 25 years (granted, Zork wasn't all that scary once you got past that Grue fellow.)
Better living through chemistry, with today's class being taught on alcohol.
I don't know much about their military history, but I once watched an Indian guy code a seriously cool bubble sort function in only 14 lines of code. It would have been much cooler if he hadn't been serious when he suggested we use it in our production code - but it was still pretty cool.
O(n^2) baby... O(n^2)
When was the last time you coded a bubble sort? Yea, thought so. It's a whole new paradigm, and it is what the next generation of US economy is going to run on.
Sounds to me like a 15 minute visit from the ergonomics wizard would work wonders for you. Back when I started typing (on a manual (non-electric) typewriter) I had a teacher that would walk around with a wooden ruler and if you were slouching, leaning on your armrest, not holding your hands right, didn't have both feet flat on the floor, were scrunching your shoulders up towards your ears (this last one is the #1 offender towards back pain, for the record) she would whack the shit out of you from behind with her wooden ruler. I think the loud smack noise was more effective than the pain (although it did hurt a bit) in adjusting your posture as it worked as a subtle reminder for everybody in the room.
Get your ergo and posture cleaned up and I would just about guarantee your back pain won't come back (at least not in half an hour.)
Patient : Dr it hurts when I do this... Doctor : Well don't do that.
It's a joke, but in all honestly it isn't a joke. If you have RSI, how about stop looking for less painful ways to continue to aggravate it and take some time off. Completely off - I'm not talking about staying home and playing on the computer for 10 hours a day (EverCrack monkeys - yea I am looking at you.) I mean off the keyboard. The company I work for gives us four weeks off per year and they damn well expect us to use it - it isn't so we can go to Disneyland or whatever (well in a way it is) - it is so we can do exactly that : take some time off and let our bodies decompress, destress, and give all the RSI some time to heal. You will never get better if you continue to wear at it - but take a month off and stay off the keyboard for four weeks, see if you don't feel like a whole new person when you come back.
You would think it was obvious, but evidently not. Take some time away from the machine. Get some sunshine in your face. Rest. Relax. Get better.
Don't think for a second that IP addresses, time and date stamps aren't part of that post. Trace that back to the DHCP and maybe a few router logs associated with the IP address back at the ol' ISP and it's as easy as pie to identify an 'anonymous coward.' How do you think the RIAA does it, and they have to ask for cooperation - the feds just walk in and jack the data like they own the place.
Just a reminder - this was a product of the best of their best. The absolute cream of their crop has managed to go zero for two (as I recall, this isn't the first rocket they a'sploded.) At least they didn't spend a ton of money on this one, money that could have went towards feeding the 400M people there that live on a dollar a day or perhaps creating an infrastructure for their newly developing 'industrial and hard goods to provide for their domestic growth' industry, or farms to grow enough food for everybody, or something like that.
There's enough there to entertain you on the idea for a while (that 'while' being until you price it with enough RAM to make it worthwhile, at which point you politely consider alternatives.)
Yea I know - I can trace my family back to a man that was one of Lafayette's troops, came over with him on the same boat. Good correlation between today's Iraq (fighting dirty) to America's back in 1776. I'm going to have to mull that one over a bit, as I might see the current US occupation in a bit of a different light - there was that whole dictator thing going on before we got there, liberation of the people and all that... but still warrants reconsideration.
I never thought about it that way. It sounds like what you are saying is that simply by stopping outsourcing, America could completely destroy the Indian economy. Fascinating.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, a single instance does not make a trend.
... can often point out plenty of inefficiencies that we have learned to accept or work around, and if they find a way to fix any of these (because they approached the problem from a different direction) then all the different boating types will benefit.
... never know when you are going to discover something completely unrelated, yet incredibly cool (ie, the history of Velcro)
That said, it is still first generation, proof of concept. With any luck we (as in we 'the world') will take advantage of all of the findings they uncover on their eight month 'journey of discovery' - doing things that people already do, but doing them from a completely different perspective
In the 'pedal powered flight' slant - what if that guy stumbled across the whole 'winglets increase lift by doing something completely different with the wing-tip vortexes (vorticii?)' thing while trying to make his pedal powered plane more efficient, studying wing design? He didn't, but if he had and the rest of the aeronautical world adopted it - it wouldn't have been a breakthrough in pedal powered flight, but certainly a breakthrough that benefits the entire industry.
Think hull design (getting one more knot out of a more efficient hull design would be worth 20% faster ship), more slippery hull materials, possibly even organic (ditto on the speed benefits), maybe some sort of massive chemical battery using a copper hull and a lead or zinc hull with salt water doing some chemical reaction (yea, this one is a bit far fetched, but still)
Actually half a million isn't unreasonable for a brand new 46' Trans-Atlantic capable powerboat / sailboat.
Price out a nice new Sea Ray Sundancer, last I checked their Sundancer 460 (roughly 46' of real space, like 51' tip to tip) model runs between half and three quarters of a Meg.
That said, I like the earlier idea of making the sails out of solar collector material (memories of Tron come to mind) and using that juice to fill up the batteries, run those the massive electric motors like this thing does.
Not unlike electric cars of only a few years ago.
... or maybe even self contained little mini nuclear reactors) and once the need to use sunlight is removed they could even make them water-tight from all directions, smooth out the shapes some and add a little ballast to let the ship ride lower in the water (to minimize the effects of surface weather / waves) - possibly even under the water. It could revolutionize the way we interact with the ocean.
It's a prototype, first generation stuff just to prove the concept.
They get this whole 'electric boat' concept worked out and they will streamline the process, build on the knowledge they get during the first few generations and eventually they will reshape the hull into a more efficient shape (perhaps take clues from large sea-borne mammals like the dolphin or whale), establish a more effective way to create electricity (such as perhaps an onboard diesel generator with massive arrays of batteries to hold the electricity
Naw, that would never work.
Ooh - now there's an idea for a new power company :
Soylent Green Energy - the only electric company using Earth's most abundant renewable resource.
No more strip mining for coal, no longer dependent on foreign oil, no more destroying forests - Go Green!
If you want Green Energy, then you want Soylent Green Energy!
Probably a shitload cheaper to set off a nuke than to simulate it, too, come to give it some serious consideration.
Just crack the seal on one, turn it loose and a'splode it - see what happens.
Maybe schedule it for the 4th of July next year, get a double bang for your buck.
What they are doing now is akin to buying a gazillion dollars worth of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, keeping it in the freezer for four decades and then spending another gazillion dollars in software and hardware to determine if it still tastes good.
Actually it goes something like this :
Burning hydrogen = 2H2 + O2 = 2H20 (exothermic reaction, meaning it releases energy in the form of heat)
Splitting water = 2H2O + energy (generally electricity) => 2H2 + O2
The magic here is that the amount of energy released in the first reaction actually exceeds the amount of energy it takes to reform the bond in the second reaction. Small difference, but it is there. The big problem is that none of the means we have to convert that heat back into electricity are anywhere near efficient enough to take advantage of that little wonder of science. If there was a way to convert the heat released into the kind of energy it takes to split the water that was 100% efficient this would probably work.
For reference, a quick Google search leads me to believe that most commercial power plants (the big ones) are about 35% efficient, and 60% efficiency is considered really, really good for a power gen plant.
They could hook up a big version of the device with some blades or something, let the wind push it around in order to move the different parts through the various magnetic fields - making a net positive return of energy...
Naw, that would never work.
This is actually two-fold, if I had to guess.
First you are right, it completely (or almost completely) eliminates the hassles of typo's in the URL. Personally I have gone to the wrong web site one too many times after typing in cmm.com (for CNN) or whatever - if I type it in on the Google search bar built into Firefox and Google likes it, I click it. The second reason : no history of going there in the drop-down box. I still haven't figured out in IE how to remove a single recently visited site from the URL dropdown box without clearing out the whole damn thing, and just because someone types www. in the URL bar I don't want it using recent (or old) history to list all the sites I have visited in the past week.
Looks lifelike, but can it lead a first world country to the brink of economic collapse and invade a third world country at the same time?
There was a hostage situation in Iran where a few of his employees were taken hostage - and he hired mercenaries to go in and rescue them. :-)
Hell yea I'd work for Ross Perot, even if he needed me to travel overseas for the position. Damn straight I would
What does that have to do with the story (around which this discussion thread revolves)?
... ' and then fill in the rest of the story about how 'bad cop' or 'violated my rights' or whatever, but the employer checks the 'got arrested' box and you don't get hired.
The guy (evidently his name is 'Neftaly Cruz') was standing in his back yard, sees a couple of cops taking down a drug dealer (maybe a lite version of some 'Rodney King beatdown') and whips out his camera phone, take a picture.
Cop walks into his back yard, grabs him, body slams him on the cop car and arrests him.
For taking a picture of an event happening on a public street.
Fucking arrested. Personally I think this is about the most KGB shit I have ever heard of - and yes, I watched it happen in Moscow with my own two eyes.
Riddle me this, Batman : when does 'got arrested' ever come off your personal life record?
As in when a prospective employer says 'have you ever been arrested?'
Answer : never. If the charges get dropped you can always say 'Yes, but
For taking a picture of events happening on a public street.
Damn, it almost would have gone better if it went down like this :
Cop : (Body slam on car) You know why I'm arresting you?
Cruz : Because I took your picture with my camera phone?
Cop : No silly, it's because you're brown!
If you don't think that an entire division of Indians somewhere doesn't have unlimited unrestricted and unaudited access to 100% of your personal financial history, enough data to recreate your entire financial identity well enough to 'become' you - you are sadly mistaken and quite possibly in for a very rude awakening.
I've been saying this all along.
If Al Qaeda really wanted to destroy the US economy, they would quit futzing around with the high risk / low reward threats on US soil and just walk a nuke into one of the massive tech centers and level the entire industrial complex. IBM has centers totaling 40,000 employees and a gazillion dollars worth of investments? Tons of other companies too? Your 20kT nuke scenario would destroy the US economy on a scale that would make 9/11 look like a kindergarden cakewalk.
Luckily Al Qaeda doesn't have the balls or the skill to pull something like this off - or maybe they are just scared.
Now that's what I call an Outsourcing Boom!
Anybody know how to contact Johnny Cash? I think we have the makings of a great song here.
'and I shot a stripper in Vegas, just to watch the cash fly...'
You want to enhance the 'scary factor' a bit? Ethanol++
Mix up a few drinks (I recommend Crown & Coke for the youngin's, and a good single malt over ice for the mature audience) and get your blood alcohol content up around where it is no longer legal to drive. Turn out the lights in your game room, use headphones instead of speakers. Isolate yourself from reality (both physically and mentally) and let the alcohol help remove the suspension of disbelief - Doom III scared the shit out of me and I have been gaming for 25 years (granted, Zork wasn't all that scary once you got past that Grue fellow.)
Better living through chemistry, with today's class being taught on alcohol.
I don't know much about their military history, but I once watched an Indian guy code a seriously cool bubble sort function in only 14 lines of code.
... O(n^2)
It would have been much cooler if he hadn't been serious when he suggested we use it in our production code - but it was still pretty cool.
O(n^2) baby
When was the last time you coded a bubble sort? Yea, thought so.
It's a whole new paradigm, and it is what the next generation of US economy is going to run on.
Sounds to me like a 15 minute visit from the ergonomics wizard would work wonders for you.
Back when I started typing (on a manual (non-electric) typewriter) I had a teacher that would walk around with a wooden ruler and if you were slouching, leaning on your armrest, not holding your hands right, didn't have both feet flat on the floor, were scrunching your shoulders up towards your ears (this last one is the #1 offender towards back pain, for the record) she would whack the shit out of you from behind with her wooden ruler. I think the loud smack noise was more effective than the pain (although it did hurt a bit) in adjusting your posture as it worked as a subtle reminder for everybody in the room.
Get your ergo and posture cleaned up and I would just about guarantee your back pain won't come back (at least not in half an hour.)
Patient : Dr it hurts when I do this ...
Doctor : Well don't do that.
It's a joke, but in all honestly it isn't a joke. If you have RSI, how about stop looking for less painful ways to continue to aggravate it and take some time off. Completely off - I'm not talking about staying home and playing on the computer for 10 hours a day (EverCrack monkeys - yea I am looking at you.) I mean off the keyboard. The company I work for gives us four weeks off per year and they damn well expect us to use it - it isn't so we can go to Disneyland or whatever (well in a way it is) - it is so we can do exactly that : take some time off and let our bodies decompress, destress, and give all the RSI some time to heal. You will never get better if you continue to wear at it - but take a month off and stay off the keyboard for four weeks, see if you don't feel like a whole new person when you come back.
You would think it was obvious, but evidently not. Take some time away from the machine. Get some sunshine in your face. Rest. Relax. Get better.
Don't think for a second that IP addresses, time and date stamps aren't part of that post. Trace that back to the DHCP and maybe a few router logs associated with the IP address back at the ol' ISP and it's as easy as pie to identify an 'anonymous coward.' How do you think the RIAA does it, and they have to ask for cooperation - the feds just walk in and jack the data like they own the place.
You can run, but you can't hide.
Just a reminder - this was a product of the best of their best. The absolute cream of their crop has managed to go zero for two (as I recall, this isn't the first rocket they a'sploded.)
At least they didn't spend a ton of money on this one, money that could have went towards feeding the 400M people there that live on a dollar a day or perhaps creating an infrastructure for their newly developing 'industrial and hard goods to provide for their domestic growth' industry, or farms to grow enough food for everybody, or something like that.
See my earlier post.
Company name : Gigabyte.
Product name : iRam
There's enough there to entertain you on the idea for a while (that 'while' being until you price it with enough RAM to make it worthwhile, at which point you politely consider alternatives.)
Yea I know - I can trace my family back to a man that was one of Lafayette's troops, came over with him on the same boat. ... but still warrants reconsideration.
Good correlation between today's Iraq (fighting dirty) to America's back in 1776. I'm going to have to mull that one over a bit, as I might see the current US occupation in a bit of a different light - there was that whole dictator thing going on before we got there, liberation of the people and all that
I never thought about it that way. It sounds like what you are saying is that simply by stopping outsourcing, America could completely destroy the Indian economy.
Fascinating.