You are correct. The battery on hybrids need to be replaced every 2-4 yrs, I believe, at the cost on the order of thousands of dollars. It's also a more complex machine so there will probably also be additional maintenance.
Even if you covered huge areas with PV, you still need to factor in how much petroleum products it would take to build it and maintain it. All PVs have a limited lifetime and begin loosing efficiency immediately, so, I would bet, there would be significantly higher usage of petroleum per kW/hr as compared to, say, a large hydro-electric plant which mainly only requires oil to keep the generators lubricated (not much).
There's more than just politics behind the reason why Congress would want to keep manufacturing in the US. It's probably true that if the US wanted the cheapest possible space station, Russia could have been paid to build and launch the entire thing. However, all of the money flowing to Russia would probably have no economic impact on the US other than depleting our reserves. By manufacturing in the US, the money stays within the US economy, creating jobs here and generally having the same effect as the huge job contracts given by the government in the past (think FDR economics...) and, theoretically, improving the strength of the economy here (as opposed to improving the economy in Russia).
I fail to see how running popular software on the "fastest computers" from each maker is unfair.
stacked the deck by running the benches on dual processors, where a fair test would have benched a single-proc app on single-proc macs and PCs
How would removing a processor on the Mac board improve the results? The only reason you would want to run a signle-proc app is to defeat the "hyper-threaded" Intel processor. If you mean single process, it still wouldn't make a difference as the programs are almost certainly multi-threaded. However, if you meant a single-threaded app, this seems like a rediculous (and clearly biased) requirement to me as nearly all modern GUI programs are multi-threaded.
Even if AE was running with one processor on the Mac, it was also running on a one-processor PC, just an apparently (significantly) better processor. If Cleaner 6 or Shake were tested, I very much doubt that there would have been a significant difference in the results.
I have re-read your post and found that you may have meant single-processor when you wrote "single-proc". In that case, there is no such program. A program is either single-threaded or multi-threaded and has no control over whether it runs on one or more processors.
Neither is the recipe to make Coca-Cola, it's a TRADE SECRET. If it were copyrighted, the recipe would be, basically, "open source" and since it would have been copyrighted over 100 years ago, someone would have made a carbon-copy of it ages ago and the original Coca-Cola company would probably be history by now.
If Boeing had copyrighted the entire design of its 757 (including the wing's airfoil specs), Airbus and others probably would have simply duplicated Boeing, and since they would have next to zero R&D overhead, courtesy of Boeing, they would be able to have significantly more profit. Does this sound fair to you?
It's the same with source code. If I were to make an excellent FEM (Finite Element Analysis) for composite materials and sold the source along with the app, it would be trivial for someone with deep pockets to purchase one, have a code monkey copy the code into their entrenched product, and simply reap the benefits of the extra functionality while I loose my shirt. Even if I were to open source everything but the computation algorithms, it would be almost trivial to hack out the algorithm code and reverse engineer it (at least, it would be much easier, esp. since I was nice enough to write all of the code into one module and you know the external function calls for the algorithms).
I was being a bit causual with my use of bullet and shell (in all cases I meant bullet...). Technically, energy (work) is defined by Newton as the rate of change of momentum over a distance. In the case of a fragmenting bullet, there is a greater transfer of momentum (and therefore more energy released) caused by greater contact area with the medium it is passing through as opposed to a non-fragmenting round traveling at the same velocity. Also, as many people on Slashdot are known to do, I typed a sentence without proofreading it (it was redundant, if you remove the last "and causing greater damage" its just fine). As for the fragmentation of the bullets used in the DC case, I read an article similar to this where it states "Because of fragmentation of the bullets, they were unable to determine conclusively whether the other two Maryland shootings involved the same gun." and took this to mean, perhaps erroneously, that the sniper was using fragmenting bullets. This last point, however, is completely irrelevant as to whether fragmenting bullets are more damaging than standard bullets and the mechanism by which they are more dangerous, which was my original intent.
The parent of my post mentioned that high velocity shells can pass through your body causing less damage than a slower one which stops in your body, in which case your body completely absorbs the bullet's energy (which is correct). Bullets which shatter, however, cause significantly greater damage by dispersing its momentum so that the body absorbs more of the bullet's energy and causing greater damage. Where am I wrong?
This is totally off topic of course, as macro-sized collisions have little to do with subatomic particles (I guess they have momentum in common, although I didn't intend to make any sort of an analogy between shattering a bullet and shattering a quark).
I haven't heard of that theory. However, the person who first theorized about tiny black holes created by the Big Bang (Stephen Hawking), later came up with another theory explaining how black holes loose energy (and therefore mass) over time. Based upon his later theory, even if micro-black holes existed near the beginning of the universe, they would have dissolved into nothing a long time ago.
So you really needn't worry about giant explosions resulting from these black holes as the conditions needed to create them only existed immediately following the Big Bang.
Just because the particle doesn't stop doesn't mean that it can't release energy. What we are really dealing with is the likelihood of a collision between this high-energy particle and a particle in your head. Over the course of its travel through the earth, it evidently collided with enough particles to convert 50 kilotonnes of energy from its momentum. If this particle is actually the size of a cell, then there is basically a 100% chance that it will collide with particles in your head resulting in substantial damage, although the change in the particle's velocity will be nearly zero.
Other high energy particles, such as gamma rays, which are substantially smaller, almost always pass through your body without any collisions resulting in zero damage, of course.
Are you sure about Colorado? I know its rather close there. It looks like New Jersey looses the most money to the fed whereas the plain states (Kansas, Nebraska, etc.) get the most. I think this is mostly due to agriculture subsidies.
Freight trains get priority over passenger lines. So if both a trainload of shipping containers and an Amtrak train need the same section of rail, guess who gets to set in a siding.
Actually, Amtrak gets top priority over freight trains:
Amtrak was created as a for-profit government corporation that was granted the right of access to the tracks owned by the freight railroads at incremental cost and with operating priority over freight trains.(Amtrak Reform Council)
Despite this, it looks like Amtrak trains are sometimes late due to freight traffic. The primary reason they're always so late, though, is apparently due to an undersized and/or an incompetent labor force. If you are interested in a detailed account of Amtrak's woes written by someone who is truly fond of trains, check this article out. Unfortunately, since it was written back in June, you'll have to pay 3USD to read it.
Whatever you call it, I'm sure you'll agree with me that cows do not have the ability to reason. From my own personal experience, they are not, by any means, one of the most intelligent creatures on the face of this planet.
I've seen areas where there are large numbers of cows (in Texas and Colorado) and they can, in fact, roam freely around some roads. However, these are always slow, country roads with low volumes of traffic and a low speed limit and, ultimately, there is always a fence to prevent them from roaming too far or near a highway with higher speed limits and/or greater traffic.
You are correct. In that circumstance, I would not physically restrict her movement as, for no other reason, that would be illegal. However, I would try to reason with her and try to convince her that it would be best if she didn't continue roaming the streets as it is a burden for drivers to stop for her sake all of the time.
Now, how can you possibly try to reason with a cow and urge it to refrain from walking in the streets? It is, in fact, impossible, as the creature is not sentient! So, I would argue cows are certainly not sound-minded whatsoever, at least by human standards and should not be treated as if they were sentient.
Although you are right that the chances of an impact are increadibly low, it is possible that a chunk of a comet could cause a Tunguska event. In fact, the most prevalent theory for the cause of the Tunguska event is that it was the result of a comet as opposed to a meteor. This is because no crater was ever found nor where any meteor shards ever found on the ground.
I don't know where the original poster came up with his "1 in 5" chance of such an event occuring over a city within 100 years as, to my knowledge, only one such event has ever been observed occuring on earth, and that, of course, occured in the middle of nowhere in Russia (if an event like this had occured over or near a city within the past couple of thousand years, you can bet it would have been documented).
It is the author that claims that hindus worship cows even though the article has the following quote "Cow in this country is like a mother" which I believe was the original poster's claim.
I'm still not convinced. In one of the articles, it was discussed that cows are resting in the streets causing traffic jams as well as occasional accidents resulting in bodily harm to people. Now, if my mother was walking around aimlessly in the streets (perhaps because she is suffering from alzheimer disease), I certainly would endeavor to place her in an environment where she would not be able to do so, for her safety as well as the safety of the motorists. It is almost certain that the welfare of cows are often placed higher than the welfare of people in India which would imply that cows are regarded better than one's own mother.
Actually, monopolies may form legally. In fact, patent laws are designed to give an inventor a monopoly on his new product for a certain length of time. Of course, in the long run, monopolies almost always drive up the price and stifle competition.
I was going off of the definition kanji=="Chinese characters", not kanji=="Japanese version of Chinese characters." Apparently, the distinction is:
"Hanzi are the semi-ideographic syllabic/whole-word characters that writers of Chinese use (regardless of their language/dialect); Kanji is a set of Japanese semi-ideographic characters, which were borrowed/derived from the Chinese Hanzi long ago." - Bob Davidson
My main point was that you couldn't simply copy and paste the article into a translation tool whereas you could use an IME to enter it tediously (I don't have any OCR software that reads hanzi).
Good luck translating this article. All of the kanji have been rendered to.gif files. There could be a link on the article to a version with the raw kanji, but I doubt it and I definitely don't have the time to manually type all of that kanji into a translator (I don't know Chinese, but I have a kanji dictionary).
Maybe there's someone out there fluent in Chinese that would be good enough to translate some of the article for the rest of us:).
Tidal power plants would increase this drag and slighty speed up this process, (very, very very slightly, not enough to make much of a noticealbe difference, but a difference none the same.)
Actually, it would be the reverse. By taking energy from the system that would have otherwise helped slowed the earth's rotation, the earth would be less effected by the tidal forces. However, the moon would still creep away at 3.8cm / year I believe.
There's no such thing as a perfect vacuum (even in deep space). However, gas can become rarified and behave somewhat differently than normal gas. There almost certainly will be shock waves, just rather weak ones. However, if you had a train travelling hundreds or thousands of miles per hour and a sudden, major leak occured, it would be like hitting a brick wall at that point due primarily to huge shockwaves which would then occur.
You are absolutely correct (although IANAL). Public officials are in a completely different boat than private citizens in concern with official communication, even if it is private. For instance, after x number of years, every correspondance conducted by the president and its staff becomes public. Currently, researches are going through tremendous amounts of information that chronicals Reagan's administration. On the other hand, it would be ludicrous to presume that after x years, as a private citizen, that all of your correspondance is public and you have no right to it whatsoever.
Re:Recycle Bins - don't you just hate them?
on
Undelete In Linux
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· Score: 1
Of course, having a recycle bin in this case would only be marginally useful. What would happen? Move everything to the recycle bin and then, as rm proceeds, remove it to and produce a segfault? I think it would be better to improve rm so that it says something like "are you really sure you want to remove all files from the system?" And performing some recursion checking wouldn't be a bad idea either (to make sure that it doesn't start removing parent directories, this should simply be illegal to do by recursion).
I would like to point out that evolution is not equivalent to other sciences (check the preface or intro of some evolutionary biology books, they'll say as much). Here's the reason:
Let's take the general theory of relativity for example. It makes a consistent, mathematical model of the environment we live in. This model can make predictions about our environment. Because of this, experiments can be devised which can test these predictions and if a number of experiments have the same result, we will have a good idea of the accuracy of this model.
Now, with evolution, only some predictions are made. These predictions are not the same as in the former case because they are not set in stone as it were. Rather, they're more like expectations and, if these expectations aren't consistent with experimentation, the theory itself is modified somewhat so that the expectations are met. Now people often argue that theories can change over time. But in this case, we have a very flexible theory that I would argue could never be proven correct or incorrect to the extent that the general theory of relativity has been, unless we manage to make a time machine to actually observe the history of this planet. Since evolution is never directly observed (certainly not the evolution prior to the present), the debate over its truth will never die unless all people begin trusting the 'best guess' history told by the dominant scientific community over the 'best guess' history told by religion. And if you believe people in the scientific community are any less biased than religious people, you are sorely mistaken.
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You are correct. The battery on hybrids need to be replaced every 2-4 yrs, I believe, at the cost on the order of thousands of dollars. It's also a more complex machine so there will probably also be additional maintenance.
Even if you covered huge areas with PV, you still need to factor in how much petroleum products it would take to build it and maintain it. All PVs have a limited lifetime and begin loosing efficiency immediately, so, I would bet, there would be significantly higher usage of petroleum per kW/hr as compared to, say, a large hydro-electric plant which mainly only requires oil to keep the generators lubricated (not much).
There's more than just politics behind the reason why Congress would want to keep manufacturing in the US. It's probably true that if the US wanted the cheapest possible space station, Russia could have been paid to build and launch the entire thing. However, all of the money flowing to Russia would probably have no economic impact on the US other than depleting our reserves. By manufacturing in the US, the money stays within the US economy, creating jobs here and generally having the same effect as the huge job contracts given by the government in the past (think FDR economics...) and, theoretically, improving the strength of the economy here (as opposed to improving the economy in Russia).
stacked the deck by running the benches on dual processors, where a fair test would have benched a single-proc app on single-proc macs and PCs
How would removing a processor on the Mac board improve the results? The only reason you would want to run a signle-proc app is to defeat the "hyper-threaded" Intel processor. If you mean single process, it still wouldn't make a difference as the programs are almost certainly multi-threaded. However, if you meant a single-threaded app, this seems like a rediculous (and clearly biased) requirement to me as nearly all modern GUI programs are multi-threaded.
Even if AE was running with one processor on the Mac, it was also running on a one-processor PC, just an apparently (significantly) better processor. If Cleaner 6 or Shake were tested, I very much doubt that there would have been a significant difference in the results.
I have re-read your post and found that you may have meant single-processor when you wrote "single-proc". In that case, there is no such program. A program is either single-threaded or multi-threaded and has no control over whether it runs on one or more processors.
Neither is the recipe to make Coca-Cola, it's a TRADE SECRET. If it were copyrighted, the recipe would be, basically, "open source" and since it would have been copyrighted over 100 years ago, someone would have made a carbon-copy of it ages ago and the original Coca-Cola company would probably be history by now.
If Boeing had copyrighted the entire design of its 757 (including the wing's airfoil specs), Airbus and others probably would have simply duplicated Boeing, and since they would have next to zero R&D overhead, courtesy of Boeing, they would be able to have significantly more profit. Does this sound fair to you?
It's the same with source code. If I were to make an excellent FEM (Finite Element Analysis) for composite materials and sold the source along with the app, it would be trivial for someone with deep pockets to purchase one, have a code monkey copy the code into their entrenched product, and simply reap the benefits of the extra functionality while I loose my shirt. Even if I were to open source everything but the computation algorithms, it would be almost trivial to hack out the algorithm code and reverse engineer it (at least, it would be much easier, esp. since I was nice enough to write all of the code into one module and you know the external function calls for the algorithms).
I was being a bit causual with my use of bullet and shell (in all cases I meant bullet...). Technically, energy (work) is defined by Newton as the rate of change of momentum over a distance. In the case of a fragmenting bullet, there is a greater transfer of momentum (and therefore more energy released) caused by greater contact area with the medium it is passing through as opposed to a non-fragmenting round traveling at the same velocity. Also, as many people on Slashdot are known to do, I typed a sentence without proofreading it (it was redundant, if you remove the last "and causing greater damage" its just fine). As for the fragmentation of the bullets used in the DC case, I read an article similar to this where it states "Because of fragmentation of the bullets, they were unable to determine conclusively whether the other two Maryland shootings involved the same gun." and took this to mean, perhaps erroneously, that the sniper was using fragmenting bullets. This last point, however, is completely irrelevant as to whether fragmenting bullets are more damaging than standard bullets and the mechanism by which they are more dangerous, which was my original intent.
This is totally off topic of course, as macro-sized collisions have little to do with subatomic particles (I guess they have momentum in common, although I didn't intend to make any sort of an analogy between shattering a bullet and shattering a quark).
This is the reason why many sniper shells are designed to shatter on impact (such as the shells used by the sniper in the Washington, DC area).
So you really needn't worry about giant explosions resulting from these black holes as the conditions needed to create them only existed immediately following the Big Bang.
Other high energy particles, such as gamma rays, which are substantially smaller, almost always pass through your body without any collisions resulting in zero damage, of course.
Are you sure about Colorado? I know its rather close there. It looks like New Jersey looses the most money to the fed whereas the plain states (Kansas, Nebraska, etc.) get the most. I think this is mostly due to agriculture subsidies.
Actually, Amtrak gets top priority over freight trains:
Amtrak was created as a for-profit government corporation that was granted the right of access to the tracks owned by the freight railroads at incremental cost and with operating priority over freight trains.(Amtrak Reform Council)
Despite this, it looks like Amtrak trains are sometimes late due to freight traffic. The primary reason they're always so late, though, is apparently due to an undersized and/or an incompetent labor force. If you are interested in a detailed account of Amtrak's woes written by someone who is truly fond of trains, check this article out. Unfortunately, since it was written back in June, you'll have to pay 3USD to read it.I've seen areas where there are large numbers of cows (in Texas and Colorado) and they can, in fact, roam freely around some roads. However, these are always slow, country roads with low volumes of traffic and a low speed limit and, ultimately, there is always a fence to prevent them from roaming too far or near a highway with higher speed limits and/or greater traffic.
Generally, the ability to reason is sufficient to be sentient.
Now, how can you possibly try to reason with a cow and urge it to refrain from walking in the streets? It is, in fact, impossible, as the creature is not sentient! So, I would argue cows are certainly not sound-minded whatsoever, at least by human standards and should not be treated as if they were sentient.
I don't know where the original poster came up with his "1 in 5" chance of such an event occuring over a city within 100 years as, to my knowledge, only one such event has ever been observed occuring on earth, and that, of course, occured in the middle of nowhere in Russia (if an event like this had occured over or near a city within the past couple of thousand years, you can bet it would have been documented).
I'm still not convinced. In one of the articles, it was discussed that cows are resting in the streets causing traffic jams as well as occasional accidents resulting in bodily harm to people. Now, if my mother was walking around aimlessly in the streets (perhaps because she is suffering from alzheimer disease), I certainly would endeavor to place her in an environment where she would not be able to do so, for her safety as well as the safety of the motorists. It is almost certain that the welfare of cows are often placed higher than the welfare of people in India which would imply that cows are regarded better than one's own mother.
-Joggle
I was going off of the definition kanji=="Chinese characters", not kanji=="Japanese version of Chinese characters." Apparently, the distinction is:
"Hanzi are the semi-ideographic syllabic/whole-word characters that writers of Chinese use (regardless of their language/dialect); Kanji is a set of Japanese semi-ideographic characters, which were borrowed/derived from the Chinese Hanzi long ago." - Bob Davidson
My main point was that you couldn't simply copy and paste the article into a translation tool whereas you could use an IME to enter it tediously (I don't have any OCR software that reads hanzi).
-Joggle
Maybe there's someone out there fluent in Chinese that would be good enough to translate some of the article for the rest of us :).
-Joggle
Actually, it would be the reverse. By taking energy from the system that would have otherwise helped slowed the earth's rotation, the earth would be less effected by the tidal forces. However, the moon would still creep away at 3.8cm / year I believe.
There's no such thing as a perfect vacuum (even in deep space). However, gas can become rarified and behave somewhat differently than normal gas. There almost certainly will be shock waves, just rather weak ones. However, if you had a train travelling hundreds or thousands of miles per hour and a sudden, major leak occured, it would be like hitting a brick wall at that point due primarily to huge shockwaves which would then occur.
You are absolutely correct (although IANAL). Public officials are in a completely different boat than private citizens in concern with official communication, even if it is private. For instance, after x number of years, every correspondance conducted by the president and its staff becomes public. Currently, researches are going through tremendous amounts of information that chronicals Reagan's administration. On the other hand, it would be ludicrous to presume that after x years, as a private citizen, that all of your correspondance is public and you have no right to it whatsoever.
Of course, having a recycle bin in this case would only be marginally useful. What would happen? Move everything to the recycle bin and then, as rm proceeds, remove it to and produce a segfault? I think it would be better to improve rm so that it says something like "are you really sure you want to remove all files from the system?" And performing some recursion checking wouldn't be a bad idea either (to make sure that it doesn't start removing parent directories, this should simply be illegal to do by recursion).
Let's take the general theory of relativity for example. It makes a consistent, mathematical model of the environment we live in. This model can make predictions about our environment. Because of this, experiments can be devised which can test these predictions and if a number of experiments have the same result, we will have a good idea of the accuracy of this model.
Now, with evolution, only some predictions are made. These predictions are not the same as in the former case because they are not set in stone as it were. Rather, they're more like expectations and, if these expectations aren't consistent with experimentation, the theory itself is modified somewhat so that the expectations are met. Now people often argue that theories can change over time. But in this case, we have a very flexible theory that I would argue could never be proven correct or incorrect to the extent that the general theory of relativity has been, unless we manage to make a time machine to actually observe the history of this planet. Since evolution is never directly observed (certainly not the evolution prior to the present), the debate over its truth will never die unless all people begin trusting the 'best guess' history told by the dominant scientific community over the 'best guess' history told by religion. And if you believe people in the scientific community are any less biased than religious people, you are sorely mistaken.