Water and oil require different materials, methods and lubrication. Oil dictates one kind of pump, water another. Some water in the oil won't change the viscosity that much or necessarily wash away lubrication, but when the oil is only, say 1/20th the content of the water, you might find that systems which work well with water get clogged and systems which work well with oil seize.
So it's a real question. I assume the answer is "You bet -- they use them all the time", but I don't know for sure. Do you? I really do want to know.
That would take HUGELY more energy than just about any separation process. A phase change (liquid to gas) takes a lot of energy. Better to have a solar collector generating electricity to power the centrifuge to clean the water.
Actually, some sort of pumping system with this as part of a centrifuge should work well. The pipe goes into a spinning section of rigid membrane pipe. The oil gets spinning in the pipe. Water spins out, since it passes through the membrane, and oil stays in the pipe. The oil keeps going wherever it's being pumped to. This solves several problems, such as waiting for the water to slowly sink out, the cranes and manual labor involved in lifting and draining, etc.
That is, if there are pumps that work well with oily water... There must be, right?
Shrimp, fish, squid, etc -- If they were in the oily water, they were dead anyway. They "breath" by pulling that water through gills or similar arrangements. Such surfaces will be clogged with oil and the animals will die.
Mammals and birds have a better chance, and it seems like a skimmer like this gets them into the boat and gives rescuers a chance to wash them. They're probably better off in the boat than out of it.
No, the answer is for the casinos to decide not to use digital machines, because they cost them money.
People should make a huge stink and sue and settle for big amounts just to make them shut up. It should happen whenever a digital machine screws up. The law is unneeded, here.
(Though personally, I think running a casino should be a crime, it ain't gonna get legislated against in my lifetime. Our education system is just too inadequate.)
Agreed on all points. Very logical. But I suspect that there is a non-logical issue here which getting two incompatible and somewhat different (from our perspective they're completely different, but from Grandma's perspective, they're only slightly different) they'll find that they cannot control the real brand which, from a neophyte's viewpoint, is not Android or Chrome, but "Google." As in:
"I run Google on my phone." "Oh? Which one?" "What do you mean?" "The phone one or the other one." "I think it's the other one." "You mean the Chrome one?" "Umm... I run a Chrome thingie on it."
'They aren't completely separate "OS systems". They are separate brands...'
Exactly. That's what makes it so odd. Proctor and Gamble are experts at managing competing brands, but you don't look at Tide (if you're Bob consumer, anyhow) and think "Proctor and Gamble". But I have heard Droid phone ads saying that Droid runs "Google". I think this will be an unpleasant experience for Google. We'll see.
Thanks for the comments on how they might/will converge -- it's interesting and encouraging.
But on a brand level, I think "Android Chrome" or "Chrome on Android" would be a much better idea than "Chrome" and "Android".
'As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet.'
Well that seems to be the main point right there. It's about the tools, not the tech.
So let there be tools. Nice ones. I personally find working in Flash a pain, because I don't like the tools that much. But then, I'm working with an Eclipse plugin.
I get the idea that Google likes products and ideas and doesn't have any leadership at all. That they figure that the ideas can slug it out, and let the best one win.
That works fine within an organization, but on a product level, it seems NUTS.
so is Android, and Debian and other Linux and WinCE setups. Netbooks have enough local processing to do a lot of things. They're not powerful compared to modern desktops, but they're amazingly powerful boxes. A 400 MHz ARM7 is twice as fast as a Sun Ultra 1 and faster than a DEC Alpha 600 5/266, and yet we think "these are pitiful little computers we can only run a web browser on"?
Actually, I think it'll be mostly competing with Android, which makes this whole thing kind of bizarre.
Why isn't Google packaging a version of Android as Chrome? A restricted version of Android would work fine, and give tinkerers a path up, sell better, allow local apps which are specially judged safe for Chrome/written with tattlers to integrate it into the cloud data, etc.
Two completely separate OS systems will cause confusion and not allow one to leverage work done on one for the other.
Personally, I'd rather have a bunch of cheap RC cars with add ons than one (or less than one) $100,000 one.
As for bulletproof RC cars, I'd rather have a fast little RC car that comes as a surprise than a slow clunky tracked thing which A. advertises more clearly where it came from (and thus where I am), B. gives the guys I'm trying to liquefy more time to get away, and C. might be bullet-proof up to a point, but there are always bigger weapons around.
As for not doing it remotely, that's not my issue -- remotely is good. It's the remote controlled sucking of money out of the military and our tax base I have a problem with. This is an RC car with armor and some signal encryption. And yet it costs a friggin' fortune, and this price is somehow justified because it's a "robot". Call a spade a spade and set its price accordingly.
Are you kidding? It'd have to do a random walk of the entire country, unless you put little blocker thingies around the area, and even then it would take forever unless your battlefield was 15x15 feet.
Much better to buy a Neato Robotics body parts cleaning robot, which actually only goes over the battlefield ONCE.
Foldable is nice, and clearly what they're aiming for, but having something very thing also means you can essentially paint a wall with it (ok, stick a bit sticker on a wall). We could (if this got bigger, brighter, etc.) have video screens on just about anything, all over the friggin' place. Very convenient, but kind of nightmarish.
If that thing had WebOS running on it, and you could buy the smaller pad version as well, that would allow you to really start thinking of WebOS as a scalable development platform with multi-touch.
And while it's doable, I don't think Apple's going to approve of/not undermine someone selling a rig to convert the iPad into a desktop setup. The pad is always going to be able recreation, whereas HP could push pads/phones/desktops coordinated to do work, all using the same platform.
I say if you've done something in a language and could recall it, you've learned it. You don't have to be good in it to have taken the time to understand what it brings to the table (at least roughly) and the complications it's designed to get around and the complications it causes. Good enough.
You're thinking fluency/mastership.
OK. Then it's perfectly sensible to aim for mastership in one programming language. But if you haven't done the lower level learning on other languages, you'll never have the mental tools to achieve mastery in that one language.
It's excellent that you have a working knowledge of the minority language in your city. I know people in the US (yes, we're famous for this kind of crap) who have one language, and only one, and would insist that the people around them use only it. I married into another language, and have had the pleasure of meeting other guys in the same situation. One of which spoke not one word of his wife's native language, even though he had been married for 5+ years and had kids who spoke that language as much as they spoke English. I've met people from other ethnic groups with the same husband situation.
"In short: monolinguism can be the result of mediocrity, but it can also be the result of a conscious aim to know one language in as much depth as possible rather than lots of languages at a basic level."
You mean to tell me that you know good programmers -- programmers who understand who computers work, and adapt to situations, who choose the right tool for the job, who are always able to do that and yet only know ONE programming language? I agree with a number of things in your post, but really, monolinguism? Monolinguism?
Monolinguism is ALWAYS the mark of a bad programmer. Choosing to concentrate on one may be the mark of a good programmer who is obsessive and wants to be the best in one thing, but if that programmer doesn't know (to the extent of having explored, played with, written some things to get the ideas of) more than one language, that my friend, is a bad programmer. He or she has only a hammer, and everything around him or her is a nail.
Monolinguism takes your perfectly good argument to an extreme where it doesn't begin to stand up.
PS. Learn a little of the second language used in your city. It'll give you an insight into how the two languages play off one another. You're getting good at communication on a simple verbal level by learning just one (sounds like a good plan) but you're missing out on the cultural aspects of a two language environment. You don't have to get good at it, but not knowing any at all cuts you off from the cultural differences which cause only 90% of the population to be bilingual.
If you're a good programmer, programming languages are easy. If you're curious about a language, you can learn the basics of it in a few hours and be adequate in the language in a weekend.
(Now, being good in the language requires more than that -- it requires a project or two, some refactoring and some time, but that's beyond what the poster said.)
Even mediocre programmers can pick up the basics of any language quickly. The focus on just a core of languages, and often, just ONE language, which we often hear from job candidates and young posters on slashdot are a reflection of the many graduates coming out of CS departments these days who exhibit a distinct lack of talent. There are still some great programmers coming out of our CS programs, but there are many, many more drones than came out of such programs 20 years ago.
Somewhere along the line, a CS degree became a way of ensuring yourself a job in much the same way a degree in accounting did, and CS began to get people who didn't really give a shit. "I'll pay the money, go to the classes, get the degree, and get a job. Then I'll be safe and happy until I die."
Talented programmers pick up languages when needed, and they do it quickly. Programmers have curiosity about computing. Missing either of those means a bad programmer. Not knowing the basics of such a simple language as C equals a bad programmer.
If you're bothered by that analysis, surf a little, write a few programs, read a few to see how things are done, and the point will be moot. Unless you're a bad programmer, in which case you'll find C very difficult, take weeks to get anywhere in the language, decide you need to take a class in C to learn it, never be able to figure out why your simplest C stuff won't run at all.
Sorry, responding to my own post: I wonder what the operational cost would be for this. What fuel are these things supposed to use? Shoving all that water into the air would take a crapload of power.
They can't take fossil fuels -- that would be a logistics issue, and would be counter-productive (though possibly still the most efficient approach).
I have this image of 3000 nuclear-powered boats, and I wonder what the mean-time between failures on such a system would be.
In many places on the Earth, air moves (on average) in predictable ways. This leads me to a number of questions.
Can we put these ships in a position so that those clouds pass over areas which need more rain?
Would that cause rain there?
Would that rain be salty?
Is this a way to (as a secondary benefit) bring fresh water to areas needing rain, or would it destroy the land downwind by slowly coating it with more and more salt?
Slashdot Mirror
Water and oil require different materials, methods and lubrication. Oil dictates one kind of pump, water another. Some water in the oil won't change the viscosity that much or necessarily wash away lubrication, but when the oil is only, say 1/20th the content of the water, you might find that systems which work well with water get clogged and systems which work well with oil seize.
So it's a real question. I assume the answer is "You bet -- they use them all the time", but I don't know for sure. Do you? I really do want to know.
That would take HUGELY more energy than just about any separation process. A phase change (liquid to gas) takes a lot of energy. Better to have a solar collector generating electricity to power the centrifuge to clean the water.
Actually, some sort of pumping system with this as part of a centrifuge should work well. The pipe goes into a spinning section of rigid membrane pipe. The oil gets spinning in the pipe. Water spins out, since it passes through the membrane, and oil stays in the pipe. The oil keeps going wherever it's being pumped to. This solves several problems, such as waiting for the water to slowly sink out, the cranes and manual labor involved in lifting and draining, etc.
That is, if there are pumps that work well with oily water... There must be, right?
Here's a very unpleasant answer:
Shrimp, fish, squid, etc -- If they were in the oily water, they were dead anyway. They "breath" by pulling that water through gills or similar arrangements. Such surfaces will be clogged with oil and the animals will die.
Mammals and birds have a better chance, and it seems like a skimmer like this gets them into the boat and gives rescuers a chance to wash them. They're probably better off in the boat than out of it.
Cause I have a mouse, here, and I could click it a LOT.
No, the answer is for the casinos to decide not to use digital machines, because they cost them money.
People should make a huge stink and sue and settle for big amounts just to make them shut up. It should happen whenever a digital machine screws up. The law is unneeded, here.
(Though personally, I think running a casino should be a crime, it ain't gonna get legislated against in my lifetime. Our education system is just too inadequate.)
Agreed on all points. Very logical. But I suspect that there is a non-logical issue here which getting two incompatible and somewhat different (from our perspective they're completely different, but from Grandma's perspective, they're only slightly different) they'll find that they cannot control the real brand which, from a neophyte's viewpoint, is not Android or Chrome, but "Google." As in:
"I run Google on my phone." "Oh? Which one?" "What do you mean?" "The phone one or the other one." "I think it's the other one." "You mean the Chrome one?" "Umm... I run a Chrome thingie on it."
We've known this for a very long time.
Read "Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine" -- ISBN-10: 0140268456
'They aren't completely separate "OS systems". They are separate brands...'
Exactly. That's what makes it so odd. Proctor and Gamble are experts at managing competing brands, but you don't look at Tide (if you're Bob consumer, anyhow) and think "Proctor and Gamble". But I have heard Droid phone ads saying that Droid runs "Google". I think this will be an unpleasant experience for Google. We'll see.
Thanks for the comments on how they might/will converge -- it's interesting and encouraging.
But on a brand level, I think "Android Chrome" or "Chrome on Android" would be a much better idea than "Chrome" and "Android".
'As long as Flash and its cousins Flex and Shockwave remain the simplest tools for producing drop-dead gorgeous Websites, they'll keep their place on the Internet.'
Well that seems to be the main point right there. It's about the tools, not the tech.
So let there be tools. Nice ones. I personally find working in Flash a pain, because I don't like the tools that much. But then, I'm working with an Eclipse plugin.
I get the idea that Google likes products and ideas and doesn't have any leadership at all. That they figure that the ideas can slug it out, and let the best one win.
That works fine within an organization, but on a product level, it seems NUTS.
so is Android, and Debian and other Linux and WinCE setups. Netbooks have enough local processing to do a lot of things. They're not powerful compared to modern desktops, but they're amazingly powerful boxes. A 400 MHz ARM7 is twice as fast as a Sun Ultra 1 and faster than a DEC Alpha 600 5/266, and yet we think "these are pitiful little computers we can only run a web browser on"?
Actually, I think it'll be mostly competing with Android, which makes this whole thing kind of bizarre.
Why isn't Google packaging a version of Android as Chrome? A restricted version of Android would work fine, and give tinkerers a path up, sell better, allow local apps which are specially judged safe for Chrome/written with tattlers to integrate it into the cloud data, etc.
Two completely separate OS systems will cause confusion and not allow one to leverage work done on one for the other.
This seems dumb.
Personally, I'd rather have a bunch of cheap RC cars with add ons than one (or less than one) $100,000 one.
As for bulletproof RC cars, I'd rather have a fast little RC car that comes as a surprise than a slow clunky tracked thing which A. advertises more clearly where it came from (and thus where I am), B. gives the guys I'm trying to liquefy more time to get away, and C. might be bullet-proof up to a point, but there are always bigger weapons around.
As for not doing it remotely, that's not my issue -- remotely is good. It's the remote controlled sucking of money out of the military and our tax base I have a problem with. This is an RC car with armor and some signal encryption. And yet it costs a friggin' fortune, and this price is somehow justified because it's a "robot". Call a spade a spade and set its price accordingly.
Are you kidding? It'd have to do a random walk of the entire country, unless you put little blocker thingies around the area, and even then it would take forever unless your battlefield was 15x15 feet.
Much better to buy a Neato Robotics body parts cleaning robot, which actually only goes over the battlefield ONCE.
It's not a robot. It's an RC car with a rocket launcher. The human controls it, so there is no violation of any law of robotics.
This is a remote controlled car with a ridiculous rocket launcher on it. It costs $100k.
iRobot is making a mint sucking money out of the military and out of US taxpayers like me.
You could do this with a $60 RC car from radio shack and a lot of duct tape -- just rig the firing button to the horn. Buy one with big wheels.
For all the things we could be using actual robots for, this is pathetic, and a lot like a million-dollar fireworks show, circa Vietnam.
Foldable is nice, and clearly what they're aiming for, but having something very thing also means you can essentially paint a wall with it (ok, stick a bit sticker on a wall). We could (if this got bigger, brighter, etc.) have video screens on just about anything, all over the friggin' place. Very convenient, but kind of nightmarish.
HP does have a desktop touch-based product.
If that thing had WebOS running on it, and you could buy the smaller pad version as well, that would allow you to really start thinking of WebOS as a scalable development platform with multi-touch.
And while it's doable, I don't think Apple's going to approve of/not undermine someone selling a rig to convert the iPad into a desktop setup. The pad is always going to be able recreation, whereas HP could push pads/phones/desktops coordinated to do work, all using the same platform.
So this is just a question of semantics.
I say if you've done something in a language and could recall it, you've learned it. You don't have to be good in it to have taken the time to understand what it brings to the table (at least roughly) and the complications it's designed to get around and the complications it causes. Good enough.
You're thinking fluency/mastership.
OK. Then it's perfectly sensible to aim for mastership in one programming language. But if you haven't done the lower level learning on other languages, you'll never have the mental tools to achieve mastery in that one language.
It's excellent that you have a working knowledge of the minority language in your city. I know people in the US (yes, we're famous for this kind of crap) who have one language, and only one, and would insist that the people around them use only it. I married into another language, and have had the pleasure of meeting other guys in the same situation. One of which spoke not one word of his wife's native language, even though he had been married for 5+ years and had kids who spoke that language as much as they spoke English. I've met people from other ethnic groups with the same husband situation.
So you're a breath of fresh air.
"In short: monolinguism can be the result of mediocrity, but it can also be the result of a conscious aim to know one language in as much depth as possible rather than lots of languages at a basic level."
You mean to tell me that you know good programmers -- programmers who understand who computers work, and adapt to situations, who choose the right tool for the job, who are always able to do that and yet only know ONE programming language? I agree with a number of things in your post, but really, monolinguism? Monolinguism?
Monolinguism is ALWAYS the mark of a bad programmer. Choosing to concentrate on one may be the mark of a good programmer who is obsessive and wants to be the best in one thing, but if that programmer doesn't know (to the extent of having explored, played with, written some things to get the ideas of) more than one language, that my friend, is a bad programmer. He or she has only a hammer, and everything around him or her is a nail.
Monolinguism takes your perfectly good argument to an extreme where it doesn't begin to stand up.
PS. Learn a little of the second language used in your city. It'll give you an insight into how the two languages play off one another. You're getting good at communication on a simple verbal level by learning just one (sounds like a good plan) but you're missing out on the cultural aspects of a two language environment. You don't have to get good at it, but not knowing any at all cuts you off from the cultural differences which cause only 90% of the population to be bilingual.
If you're a good programmer, programming languages are easy. If you're curious about a language, you can learn the basics of it in a few hours and be adequate in the language in a weekend.
(Now, being good in the language requires more than that -- it requires a project or two, some refactoring and some time, but that's beyond what the poster said.)
Even mediocre programmers can pick up the basics of any language quickly. The focus on just a core of languages, and often, just ONE language, which we often hear from job candidates and young posters on slashdot are a reflection of the many graduates coming out of CS departments these days who exhibit a distinct lack of talent. There are still some great programmers coming out of our CS programs, but there are many, many more drones than came out of such programs 20 years ago.
Somewhere along the line, a CS degree became a way of ensuring yourself a job in much the same way a degree in accounting did, and CS began to get people who didn't really give a shit. "I'll pay the money, go to the classes, get the degree, and get a job. Then I'll be safe and happy until I die."
Talented programmers pick up languages when needed, and they do it quickly. Programmers have curiosity about computing. Missing either of those means a bad programmer. Not knowing the basics of such a simple language as C equals a bad programmer.
If you're bothered by that analysis, surf a little, write a few programs, read a few to see how things are done, and the point will be moot. Unless you're a bad programmer, in which case you'll find C very difficult, take weeks to get anywhere in the language, decide you need to take a class in C to learn it, never be able to figure out why your simplest C stuff won't run at all.
And ya know what? The same goes for FORTRAN!
Sorry, responding to my own post: I wonder what the operational cost would be for this. What fuel are these things supposed to use? Shoving all that water into the air would take a crapload of power.
They can't take fossil fuels -- that would be a logistics issue, and would be counter-productive (though possibly still the most efficient approach).
I have this image of 3000 nuclear-powered boats, and I wonder what the mean-time between failures on such a system would be.
In many places on the Earth, air moves (on average) in predictable ways. This leads me to a number of questions.
Can we put these ships in a position so that those clouds pass over areas which need more rain?
Would that cause rain there?
Would that rain be salty?
Is this a way to (as a secondary benefit) bring fresh water to areas needing rain, or would it destroy the land downwind by slowly coating it with more and more salt?
The article says that 3 ships is nothing. We need $7 billion worth of ships to stop the temperature from increasing.
WHAT? We can stop warming in its tracks for just $7 billion? That's very little money.