If it was not spelled out in the rules I would pick a place further to the north where the sun does not set at this time of the year. Then they could get a full 24 hours of sunlight to drive the motors.
When the sun goes down the aircraft will either need to glide or operate off of power from batteries. If the sun "did not" go down for 24 hours you could sustain flight without batteries or by depending upon gliding. Then the only limit is how long the pilot(s) could remain in the air.
Yea, I will go to Texas, you go to Florida. I will lift one end of the Gulf of Mexico, you do the other. We can tip the entire Gulf into this device to filter out the oil.
I am still working on the problem of finding a container big enough to hold the clean water... Maybe we can use the Mediterranean.
We had oil/water separators as well. I did not care too much for those, while they did let the water settle out and the oil float on top they had a horrible smell as the water was very anoxic as much of the oxygen had been pulled out of the water to to create oxides with the oil. I think we are facing the same problem with in the gulf with the oil that is in the deep water or hit with a dispersant. It is still a bunch of Carbon/Hydrogen atoms that are looking for a bit of 'lovin with that wild-child of the 60's, oxygen.
I worked in the oil industry in the 80's and 90's (for Amoco coincidentally) and we had adsorbent spill control diapers and booms that we could run through a ringer to extract the oil. Every facility had a stockpile of these things.
I took an oil spill control class in Pueblo Co one year and we trained on boom deployment, oil recovery and cleanup. This was one of the tools we had available to us.
Now maybe the hype is that these new products are made of treated cotton (sounds nice and eco-friendly). Once anything picks up oil it is not so eco-friendly and just becomes another piece of hazardous waste.
So does this mean that whenever I read a Microsoft press release I cannot chant "bullshit, bullshit, bullshit" any more since they have patented sounds associated with fonts.
Now if we can only get them to use their very own patented font for anything they write like this turkey of an idea.
I seems to me that this problem would pop up any time you worked with an irrational number.
Back in the early days the analog computer was used for things like ballistic calculations. I would think that they would be less prone to this type of problem.
Linearity may still be an issue (analog systems have their own set of problems).
Comcast will not rest on it's laurels until it has won the Golden Poo awards for three years running! Then they will place the Golden Poo awards in the corporate lobby.
After three Golden Poo awards they qualify for the Golden Steaming Pile award where the trophy is four feet tall and comes with logos for their letterhead and stickers for all of their trucks.
Of course, those of us who are Comcast customers can suggest that they be given special dispensation and a special award granted before the three years running requirement.
I agree, other than liebenstaum there is little in the way of resources that a planetary body can offer to any space-faring species. Everything else is easier to get in space where you do not have to expend energy to launch the materials into orbit out of a gravity well.
If an alien species required a gravitational environment for reproduction or for a comfortable existence how likely would it be that Earth would be the ideal fit? Why not Mars with it's lower gravitational field, Venus with it's warmer temperature, Io with it's friendly environment or Europa with an abundance of water.
A space-fairing species may just be lonely and looking for intelligent conversation. Who is to say that we are all that smart or interesting (other than ourselves through a species-centric nihilism).
Even when there was not a net gain (land, food, resources) primitive human societies have always been damaged by interaction with an advanced culture. No matter if this was technological, ethical, cultural or even when the concepts of human values were involved.
They should have portrayed him in drag, illegally crossing the Canadian border. That would have been funnier and a twist on how the current incarnation of alQueda has to dress in drag to hide.
While I emphasize to this woman's predicament, possible mental illness and/or delusional state I find it difficult to correlate her story to the eventual decision by the legislature to pass the bill.
It would be like someone petitioning against Reynolds Aluminum because they profit from aluminum foil sales. "It is all a vast conspiracy, I have to wear this aluminum hat to keep the mind control rays from Planet #10 under control."
There are wack-jobs on any side of any issue you can imagine. It was unfortunate that they did not screen this one out of the proceedings.
I carried a Itronix Duo-Touch II for a few months during field-work. It is a very robust tablet and is pretty much everything-proof (other than driving over it with a truck).
I too agree with Google's decision to back out of mainland China until the regime decides to grant greater freedoms on information for their people.
You have to take a stand for something. I think that this is a honorable position for Google to take and it improves my opinion of them as a company and of the executives who are going to catch the flack from investors over their decision.
The NHTSA does not need to evolve a new set of standards out there to address part of this problem. Just require that all automobiles meet the FCC Part 15, Class B standards for electromagnetic susceptibility. It is stupid that this is not done already.
There are plenty of critical pieces of equipment that cannot turn up their noses and fail because of electromagnetic interference. Medical equipment is tested to at least this standard every day. There are hundreds of testing laboratories throughout the world who manufacture products that have to meet these specifications. There are thousands of engineers who already do this type of testing.
Now lines of code and software is a different animal. In a hundred million lines of code there are certainly bugs and flaws.
A few years ago I worked for a CLEC (phone company) and we received ASR's (service requests) from other phone companies by FAX. It was all electronic documents that were automatically converted by OCR into a standard format.
On occasion we would get an ASR that was sent in upside down (top to bottom) and the OCR program could not cope with it. As we were only dealing with a few dozen of these a day it was easy to rotate the image as they were all stored in PDF format.
The patent office deals with hundreds or thousands of applications a day, some percentage come in by FAX. I imagine that either they do not want to spend the staff hours to rotate documents for storage or reading or this is a holdover from the bureaucratic, arcane ways of the patent process.
If you have ever filed a patent (successfully) you are aware that there are some weird requirements for formatting.
I work for a small company where all but two of the employees work remotely from our homes. We are an engineering-consulting company and are very dependent upon each other for we each have very different skill-sets. Here is my impression on how it works for us;
1. The hiring process is very prolonged, taking weeks and multiple interviews with many people. Only part of this is for the technical skills necessary to do the kind of work we do. The interview process is to make sure that our new hires are cultural fits into our work model and are capable of self-starting and have initiative.
2. We keep in contact constantly by telephone, GoToMeeting, email and collaborative work assignments.
3. While we have owners who are also employees we work in a very dynamic manner. It is not unusual for a very new person to be the senior of a manager/owner on certain projects.
4. We all share the same goals for our company. We know what is happening, what is important at the moment and the need to be completely flexible.
As we grow more we are certain to eventually develop some sort of central office but the heart and soul of the company will be spread across the company.
Power grids do transfer a tremendous amount of electro-magnetic energy into our planetary environment and with some effort I bet you could receive them from the moon and the nearby planets. Receiving a signal from well outside of our solar system would be complicated by the natural processes of our planets. "Sferics in our own atmosphere, the constant noise of Jupiter and Venus, the noise from our own star all are incredibly noisy at the lower frequencies.
Unless someone was specifically listening to our star system, across the entire RF spectrum from 50 Hz up to around 300 GHz they would probably overlook any noises we are making now. To get tremendous gain factors out of antennas we make parabolic dishes large and this reduces the beam-width that you can send or listen to. Even with an array of moon based radio telescopes it would take an incredible amount of time to listen to our entire stellar neighborhood on a star-by-star basis.
For a better understanding of signal losses with distance, look at the description on Wikipedia;
Given that the "currency" (units, seashells, whatever) have some intrinsic value in that you put labor into the creation of some sort of work product there needs to be a guarantee of the currency, someone or some-thing (government, bank, etc...) who backs up that currency with assets. Also an exchange would need to be established to control the conversion of this new currency into other units. If you do not have these mechanisms in place then your new currency is as valuable as wampum was to the American Indians.
When the European powers moved into the Americas they discovered that wampum was being used as a currency for the exchange of services and commodities and as a means of having portable wealth. The colonies, companies and fur-trappers would bring in mass-produced glass beads from Europe where they had very little value and exchange these to the Indians for furs, food and land. Within a few decades the entire system of wampum devalued itself and had collapsed.
Virtual currency is just 1's and 0's on a computer (our real currency is more like that now than it ever was). How easy would it be to create the equivalent of glass beads in our virtual wampum on-line society?
My younger brother discovered a key principle of the viscosity of fluids when he was 12 years old. He and his friend decided to drop a gigantic boulder down the center hole of an outhouse, they were standing over the "opening" to see the effect.
I imagine the sound was much "deeper" but their screams were really high.
It was a 2 mile walk to the nearest running water for them, our camping trips were never the same after that.
A significant part of the cost of a gallon of motor vehicle fuel (gasoline, alcohols, oxygenators, etc..) is in taxes.
Ironically, some of those taxes were sky high when fuel prices were high if they were based upon the % of cost.
As a result, some people drove much less, purchased more fuel efficient vehicles, etc...
When prices came back down, demand was down and consumption did not rebound to the previous levels. The economic meltdown did not help that either. This all became part of the problems for states, counties, parishes and cities who depended upon those taxes for their expenses.
You can bet that there will not be tankers of Brazilian ethanol moving into the states. For one thing the corn lobby would toss a hissy fit, the transportation system is not really set up to move it unless you blended it at coastal refineries like in Galveston TX and 80% of the American vehicles could not deal with anything more concentrated than E85.
Did you notice that there was not a big price break between straight-old gasoline and E85? If the alcohol in E85 (15%) was cheaper then the price of fuel should have been incrementally lower.
Slashdot Mirror
If it was not spelled out in the rules I would pick a place further to the north where the sun does not set at this time of the year. Then they could get a full 24 hours of sunlight to drive the motors.
When the sun goes down the aircraft will either need to glide or operate off of power from batteries. If the sun "did not" go down for 24 hours you could sustain flight without batteries or by depending upon gliding. Then the only limit is how long the pilot(s) could remain in the air.
Yea, I will go to Texas, you go to Florida. I will lift one end of the Gulf of Mexico, you do the other. We can tip the entire Gulf into this device to filter out the oil.
I am still working on the problem of finding a container big enough to hold the clean water... Maybe we can use the Mediterranean.
We had oil/water separators as well. I did not care too much for those, while they did let the water settle out and the oil float on top they had a horrible smell as the water was very anoxic as much of the oxygen had been pulled out of the water to to create oxides with the oil. I think we are facing the same problem with in the gulf with the oil that is in the deep water or hit with a dispersant. It is still a bunch of Carbon/Hydrogen atoms that are looking for a bit of 'lovin with that wild-child of the 60's, oxygen.
Here is an example of those booms;
http://www.absorbentsonline.com/oil-absorbent-boom-oil-containment-boom.htm
I worked in the oil industry in the 80's and 90's (for Amoco coincidentally) and we had adsorbent spill control diapers and booms that we could run through a ringer to extract the oil. Every facility had a stockpile of these things.
I took an oil spill control class in Pueblo Co one year and we trained on boom deployment, oil recovery and cleanup. This was one of the tools we had available to us.
Now maybe the hype is that these new products are made of treated cotton (sounds nice and eco-friendly). Once anything picks up oil it is not so eco-friendly and just becomes another piece of hazardous waste.
I imagine a boot camp with scenes reminiscent of the conditioning in "A Clockwork Orange".
No! No! No!, not Ludwig Von.....
Since it multiplies brain cells the "eternal leader" of North Korea will look much more like the cartoon character in Team America.
We need to send Hans Brrrrix to stop their nuclear fusion power program. Make sure he deals with the laser beam equipped sharks first.
So does this mean that whenever I read a Microsoft press release I cannot chant "bullshit, bullshit, bullshit" any more since they have patented sounds associated with fonts.
Now if we can only get them to use their very own patented font for anything they write like this turkey of an idea.
Gobble Gobble Microsoft
What has he been smoking? Volunteer? As in giving away your services to an agency that has a mission to take away your rights?
I seems to me that this problem would pop up any time you worked with an irrational number.
Back in the early days the analog computer was used for things like ballistic calculations. I would think that they would be less prone to this type of problem.
Linearity may still be an issue (analog systems have their own set of problems).
Comcast will not rest on it's laurels until it has won the Golden Poo awards for three years running! Then they will place the Golden Poo awards in the corporate lobby.
After three Golden Poo awards they qualify for the Golden Steaming Pile award where the trophy is four feet tall and comes with logos for their letterhead and stickers for all of their trucks.
Of course, those of us who are Comcast customers can suggest that they be given special dispensation and a special award granted before the three years running requirement.
I agree, other than liebenstaum there is little in the way of resources that a planetary body can offer to any space-faring species. Everything else is easier to get in space where you do not have to expend energy to launch the materials into orbit out of a gravity well.
If an alien species required a gravitational environment for reproduction or for a comfortable existence how likely would it be that Earth would be the ideal fit? Why not Mars with it's lower gravitational field, Venus with it's warmer temperature, Io with it's friendly environment or Europa with an abundance of water.
A space-fairing species may just be lonely and looking for intelligent conversation. Who is to say that we are all that smart or interesting (other than ourselves through a species-centric nihilism).
Even when there was not a net gain (land, food, resources) primitive human societies have always been damaged by interaction with an advanced culture. No matter if this was technological, ethical, cultural or even when the concepts of human values were involved.
They should have portrayed him in drag, illegally crossing the Canadian border. That would have been funnier and a twist on how the current incarnation of alQueda has to dress in drag to hide.
While I emphasize to this woman's predicament, possible mental illness and/or delusional state I find it difficult to correlate her story to the eventual decision by the legislature to pass the bill.
It would be like someone petitioning against Reynolds Aluminum because they profit from aluminum foil sales. "It is all a vast conspiracy, I have to wear this aluminum hat to keep the mind control rays from Planet #10 under control."
There are wack-jobs on any side of any issue you can imagine. It was unfortunate that they did not screen this one out of the proceedings.
Good walls work both ways. To "help" China from being tainted by the evil ways of us westerners let's just cut them off completely.
I carried a Itronix Duo-Touch II for a few months during field-work. It is a very robust tablet and is pretty much everything-proof (other than driving over it with a truck).
http://www.gd-itronix.com/index.cfm?page=Products:Duo-Touch_II
It is pricey as Itronix was purchased by General Dynamics but is mil rated.
I too agree with Google's decision to back out of mainland China until the regime decides to grant greater freedoms on information for their people.
You have to take a stand for something. I think that this is a honorable position for Google to take and it improves my opinion of them as a company and of the executives who are going to catch the flack from investors over their decision.
What would really be cool is if the table surface was a touch LCD display that you could put digitized maps up on.
For $30,000 US you could have a new one constructed in your yard that would have more rooms and modern conveniences like A TOILET!
They may also serve as a stopgap shelter during the upcoming zombie invasions.
The NHTSA does not need to evolve a new set of standards out there to address part of this problem. Just require that all automobiles meet the FCC Part 15, Class B standards for electromagnetic susceptibility. It is stupid that this is not done already.
There are plenty of critical pieces of equipment that cannot turn up their noses and fail because of electromagnetic interference. Medical equipment is tested to at least this standard every day. There are hundreds of testing laboratories throughout the world who manufacture products that have to meet these specifications. There are thousands of engineers who already do this type of testing.
Now lines of code and software is a different animal. In a hundred million lines of code there are certainly bugs and flaws.
A few years ago I worked for a CLEC (phone company) and we received ASR's (service requests) from other phone companies by FAX. It was all electronic documents that were automatically converted by OCR into a standard format.
On occasion we would get an ASR that was sent in upside down (top to bottom) and the OCR program could not cope with it. As we were only dealing with a few dozen of these a day it was easy to rotate the image as they were all stored in PDF format.
The patent office deals with hundreds or thousands of applications a day, some percentage come in by FAX. I imagine that either they do not want to spend the staff hours to rotate documents for storage or reading or this is a holdover from the bureaucratic, arcane ways of the patent process.
If you have ever filed a patent (successfully) you are aware that there are some weird requirements for formatting.
I work for a small company where all but two of the employees work remotely from our homes. We are an engineering-consulting company and are very dependent upon each other for we each have very different skill-sets. Here is my impression on how it works for us;
1. The hiring process is very prolonged, taking weeks and multiple interviews with many people. Only part of this is for the technical skills necessary to do the kind of work we do. The interview process is to make sure that our new hires are cultural fits into our work model and are capable of self-starting and have initiative.
2. We keep in contact constantly by telephone, GoToMeeting, email and collaborative work assignments.
3. While we have owners who are also employees we work in a very dynamic manner. It is not unusual for a very new person to be the senior of a manager/owner on certain projects.
4. We all share the same goals for our company. We know what is happening, what is important at the moment and the need to be completely flexible.
As we grow more we are certain to eventually develop some sort of central office but the heart and soul of the company will be spread across the company.
They could hear that and think there is a pulsar in the neighborhood. They rotate at quite regular rates and generate a tremendous magnetic field.
Some of the sounds of pulsars can be heard here;
http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pulsar/Education/Sounds/sounds.html
Power grids do transfer a tremendous amount of electro-magnetic energy into our planetary environment and with some effort I bet you could receive them from the moon and the nearby planets. Receiving a signal from well outside of our solar system would be complicated by the natural processes of our planets. "Sferics in our own atmosphere, the constant noise of Jupiter and Venus, the noise from our own star all are incredibly noisy at the lower frequencies.
Unless someone was specifically listening to our star system, across the entire RF spectrum from 50 Hz up to around 300 GHz they would probably overlook any noises we are making now. To get tremendous gain factors out of antennas we make parabolic dishes large and this reduces the beam-width that you can send or listen to. Even with an array of moon based radio telescopes it would take an incredible amount of time to listen to our entire stellar neighborhood on a star-by-star basis.
For a better understanding of signal losses with distance, look at the description on Wikipedia;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-space_path_loss
For an understanding of antenna gain and beamwidth (directivity) look at this description in Wikipedia;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antenna_gain
Given that the "currency" (units, seashells, whatever) have some intrinsic value in that you put labor into the creation of some sort of work product there needs to be a guarantee of the currency, someone or some-thing (government, bank, etc...) who backs up that currency with assets. Also an exchange would need to be established to control the conversion of this new currency into other units. If you do not have these mechanisms in place then your new currency is as valuable as wampum was to the American Indians.
When the European powers moved into the Americas they discovered that wampum was being used as a currency for the exchange of services and commodities and as a means of having portable wealth. The colonies, companies and fur-trappers would bring in mass-produced glass beads from Europe where they had very little value and exchange these to the Indians for furs, food and land. Within a few decades the entire system of wampum devalued itself and had collapsed.
Virtual currency is just 1's and 0's on a computer (our real currency is more like that now than it ever was). How easy would it be to create the equivalent of glass beads in our virtual wampum on-line society?
My younger brother discovered a key principle of the viscosity of fluids when he was 12 years old. He and his friend decided to drop a gigantic boulder down the center hole of an outhouse, they were standing over the "opening" to see the effect.
I imagine the sound was much "deeper" but their screams were really high.
It was a 2 mile walk to the nearest running water for them, our camping trips were never the same after that.
A significant part of the cost of a gallon of motor vehicle fuel (gasoline, alcohols, oxygenators, etc..) is in taxes.
Ironically, some of those taxes were sky high when fuel prices were high if they were based upon the % of cost.
As a result, some people drove much less, purchased more fuel efficient vehicles, etc...
When prices came back down, demand was down and consumption did not rebound to the previous levels. The economic meltdown did not help that either. This all became part of the problems for states, counties, parishes and cities who depended upon those taxes for their expenses.
You can bet that there will not be tankers of Brazilian ethanol moving into the states. For one thing the corn lobby would toss a hissy fit, the transportation system is not really set up to move it unless you blended it at coastal refineries like in Galveston TX and 80% of the American vehicles could not deal with anything more concentrated than E85.
Did you notice that there was not a big price break between straight-old gasoline and E85? If the alcohol in E85 (15%) was cheaper then the price of fuel should have been incrementally lower.